"Linux kernel development which is driven by plain-text email
discussion needs better or alternative collaborative tooling "to bring
in new contributors and maintain and sustain Linux in the future," says
Sarah Novotny, Microsoft's representative on the Linux Foundation board.
Said tooling could be "a text-based, email-based patch system that can
then also be represented in a way that developers who have grown up in
the last five or ten years are more familiar with," she added.
...
Should it migrate toward something more like, say, issues and pull
requests on the Microsoft-owned GitHub? “I’m not saying that there will
be a move in any time that I can see my crystal ball’s broken but I do
think there needs to be expansions in the way people can enter that
workflow,” said Novotny.
“It is a fairly specific workflow that is a challenge for some newer
developers to engage with. As an example, my partner submitted a patch
to OpenBSD a few weeks ago, and he had to set up an entirely new mail
client which didn’t mangle his email message to HTML-ise or do other
things to it, so he could even make that one patch. That’s a barrier to
entry that’s pretty high for somebody who may want to be a first-time
contributor.”"
https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/25/linux_kernel_email/
