On Sun, May 05, 2024 at 08:22:12 +0300, Benson Muite wrote: > On 04/05/2024 22.56, Ben Boeckel via Overseers wrote: > > As a fellow FOSS maintainer I definitely appreciate the benefit of being > > email-based (`mutt` is far better at wrangling notifications from > > umpteen places than…well basically any website is at even their own), > > but as a *contributor* it is utterly opaque. It's not always clear if my > > patch has been seen, if it is waiting on maintainer time, or for me to > > do something. After one review, what is the courtesy time before pushing > > a new patchset to avoid a review "crossing in the night" as I push more > > patches? Did I get everyone that commented on the patch the first time > > in the Cc list properly? Is a discussion considered resolved (FWIW, > > Github is annoying with its conversation resolution behavior IMO; > > GitLab's explicit closing is much better). Has it been merged? To the > > right place? And that's for patches I author; figuring out the status of > > patches I'm interested in but not the author of is even harder. A forge > > surfaces a lot of this information pretty well and, to me, GitLab at > > least offers usable enough email messages (e.g., discussions on threads > > will thread in email too) that the public tracking of such things is far > > more useful on the whole. > > This is an area that also needs standardization of important > functionality. Some method of archiving the content is also helpful - > email does this well but typically does not offer dashboard. Sourcehut > makes reading threads using the web interface very easy.
The other thing that email makes difficult to do: jump in on an existing discussion without having been subscribed previously. I mean, I know how to tell `mutt` to set an `In-Reply-To` header and munge a proper reply by hand once I find a `Message-Id` (though a fully proper `References` header is usually way too much work to be worth it), but this is not something I expect others to be able to easily perform. > Web interfaces are difficult to automate, but friendlier for occasional > use and encouraging new contributions. Tools separate from the version > control system such as Gerrit, Phabricator, Rhode Code and Review Board > also enable discussion management and overview. Note that forges tend to have very rich APIs. It's certainly not as easy as clicking around manually for one-off tasks or setting up a shell pipeline to process some emails, but building automation isn't impossible. --Ben
