FYI: https://externals.io/message/87501#87501
Also: wow, that was 7 years ago?! :O Marco Pivetta https://mastodon.social/@ocramius https://ocramius.github.io/ On Wed, 12 Apr 2023 at 15:53, Alex Wells <autau...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hey. > > PHP currently uses internals@lists.php.net for communication. That > includes > mostly RFCs (or their votings, or their pre-discussion) and sometimes > questions about the implementation or possible bugs. > > While emailing definitely works, it's not the best UX out there. Here are > some immediate flaws which make the process harder than it should be: > - having to subscribe to a mailing list to even see the discussions > - supporting public archives such as externals.io to expose discussions > to > the public for those who aren't subscribed and keep historical data > - having to learn the specific, uncommon rules of replying: bottom > posting, word wrapping, removing footers. It's not to say any of those > rules are complex or hard to follow; it's that they're basically > inapplicable outside of emails, so they're usually not known by newcomers. > Also popular emailing clients don't do any of that automatically, making > each reply tedious. > - no way of editing a message. Mistakes will always be made, so being able > to quickly fix them would be nice > - no formatting, especially code blocks. Sure, they are possible through > HTML, but there's no single common way which all of the emailing clients > will understand - like Markdown > - no reactions - it's hard to tell whether something is supported or not. > This includes both the initiative being discussed and the replies that > follow. Sure, you can usually kind of judge the general narrative based on > the replies, but it's not always clear what's in favor. There are usually > many divergent branches of discussions and it's unknown what's supported > the most. > > Based on those issues and PHP, I propose moving the discussions elsewhere - > to some kind of modern platform. Since this is quite a big change in the > processes used, I imagine an RFC would be needed. But before I do that I > want to measure the reactions. If it goes well, I'll proceed with an RFC > draft. > > There are basically two choices here - a messenger-like platform (i.e. > Slack, Teams) or a developer focused platform like GitHub. While messengers > certainly work, they're more focused on working with teammates rather than > actual discussions. They usually don't have a simple way to navigate > publicly and are poor at separating multiple topics into threads. Some > projects use them for that purpose, but it's usually a worse experience > than what GitHub provides. > > GitHub is already used by PHP for both the source code and the issues, so > that is a good candidate, especially since it's a platform designed to > handle cases like this. Also, that should be a much easier transition now > that the source and issues were moved to GitHub. > > Also, to be clear: I'm not proposing to remove all PHP mailing lists; some > of them are one way (i.e. notifications for something) so they should > definitely stay that way. Some of them might not even be used anymore. > However, I want this change to affect all two-way (discussion) mailing > lists if possible. Also, this does not include moving RFCs themselves to > GitHub, only the discussion that happens via email. > > What are your thoughts? >
