There are a few strengths of discussion on the ticketing system over mailing lists. Mailing lists were fundamentally designed in the 1970's and early 1980's, and the state of the art from a user experience perspective has barely advanced since then.
* Mailing lists tend to end up with fragmented threads for large discussions, subject changes, conversation restarts, topic forks, and simple etiquette errors - all of which can make it very difficult to locate the entire discussion related to a feature. There is no single source that an interested party can study thoroughly to understand the entire conversation, rather it's more of a scavenger hunt with no way to be certain you've covered all the territory. 8844 for example would have ended up being numerous parallel threads as people forked the conversation to have side discussions or offer alternatives, there's no way such a ticket would ever have simply been a single massive email thread with no forks. * Mailing lists don't allow for selective subscription. If I find a ticket interesting, I can watch the ticket and follow along. Conversely and more importantly if I find it uninteresting I don't have to wade through that discussion as it progresses. If I think I want to follow all tickets, that should be possible too. Likewise if I want to watch tickets that involve certain components, certain milestones, certain labels, or even certain contributors, I can create a subscription for such, and get emails accordingly. I can also subscribe to RSS feeds and add them to my news reader if I prefer that approach better. A tremendous amount of control is given to the user over what they want to see, and how they want to see it. * The concern that Chris voiced about having to open a web browser to participate is actually not true unless Apache's Jira install is not well configured. If you reply to an email notification from Jira it should appear as a comment on the ticket. It shouldn't exclude anyone (even those who want to participate but somehow can't be motivated to create an account in the ticketing system, but who _could_ be bothered to figure out the arcane mailing list subscription incantation). * Permalinking conversations is an important capability. It's possible with a mailing list, but it's nontrivial, when you want to create that permalink, you must first locate the discussion in the nonprimary interface (the online archives), which involves a lot more effort. Historically we've also seen existing "permalinks" become invalidated with mailing list archive software is switched or upgraded. This leads to the next point: * One of the simple but hugely valuable features of Jira is the short memorable ticket numbers. Several people in this thread have mentioned 8844. Those who care about that conversation know that ID by heart. And in casual conversation if you want to bring someone's attention to an issue, you can mention it by ID without having to try to remember what the original thread subject was so the other participant can also hopefully remember and maybe locate it later. Write the number down on a napkin and you _will_ find the issue, and know it's the right one, and not some similar but unrelated conversation. * Ticketing systems can maintain a summarized version of the conversation in the ticket's description as a shortcut for those who want to know the current state without having to read potentially months of back history to catch up (the event log model). Event logs are a great way to capture changing state, but they're horridly inefficient if your only option is to start from 0 and replay the entire log, particularly when a lot of the contributors are as long winded as I am. On Mon, Aug 15, 2016 at 5:29 PM Jonathan Ellis <jbel...@gmail.com> wrote: > ... but it's important to note that if we take this approach, we need to be > careful not to just summarize the conclusion of the discussion, but also > approaches that were examined and found to be unviable, and why. Otherwise > people looking at the ticket will have to cross reference back to a much > harder-to-follow discussion on the list archives. > > On Mon, Aug 15, 2016 at 6:26 PM, Jonathan Ellis <jbel...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > On Mon, Aug 15, 2016 at 6:18 PM, Josh McKenzie <jmcken...@apache.org> > > wrote: > > > >> 2: 8844 would have been a great candidate for being discussed on the > >> mailing list rather than on JIRA. While I made it a point to front-load > >> design, we still ran into some unforeseen consequences from the design > >> that > >> might have been prevented by more wide-spread discussion. In my opinion, > >> it > >> would have made sense to have the initial discussion(s) take place on > the > >> mailing list until a design had settled out, worked that design and the > >> day-to-day back and forth on JIRA, then bringing it back to the mailing > >> list when we ran into the problems with the design. > >> > > > > This is a good example of what I had in mind here. > > > > -- > > Jonathan Ellis > > Project Chair, Apache Cassandra > > co-founder, http://www.datastax.com > > @spyced > > > > > > -- > Jonathan Ellis > Project Chair, Apache Cassandra > co-founder, http://www.datastax.com > @spyced >
