[federicotdn]

I would change the development platform. Doing everything by mail makes things more difficult for people that are not used to the older mail+patch workflow. Having something like GitLab or sourcehut would be nice, as it would also bring a more modern bug tracker.

Personally I find following email conversations much harder than just a single conversation thread like in a GitHub issue, for example.

[b112]

All sensible email clients have a 'thread view' for just this purpose, which effectively makes it a 'single conversation thread'.

[federicotdn]

Yes, the Gmail web client does this. However my (personal) problem comes more from reading the emacs-devel archives, where the thread view takes the shape of something more like a tree (maybe I'm not configuring something correctly). I was subscribed to emacs-devel at some point (which made reading easier) but it started filling up my account storage so I un-subscribed.

[iLemming]

Use https://yhetil.org/emacs-devel to browse the threads. If you use mu4e or notmuch and often delete some older emails locally, but still want to read the whole thread, you can write some elisp helpers that would find the thread on point (based on email-id) or even download the whole thread.

[mdaniel]

I recently learned FSF does have a GL instance but it seems to be locked down to just "approved" emails and also only used for its CI capabilities: https://emba.gnu.org/emacs/emacs/-/pipelines

[iLemming]

I agree, and I've been observing this for years. It's now becoming a generational problem - younger programmers know and understand PR model, they don't want to deal with mailing threads and patches. These days, young people are like: "You sent me what? an email? Are you joking?" People shouldn't be catering for the comfort of the maintainers, no matter how arguably mailing threads are techologically more superior, it should be the opposite.