Open Source

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[–] u_tamtam@programming.dev 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I figured they'd be juggling a lot of mails

Yeah, but organized into as many threads as there are issues/PRs, so it's exactly as daunting as the same list as viewed on GitHub/project/issues (because it is exactly the same content).

and I guess it is possible for some people to stay on top of that

It's the crux of being a maintainer, it's your job "to stay on top of that", with, on larger projects, ad-hoc tooling and automation being the only way. Email is infinitely more flexible than the one-size-fits-all take by GitHub on that.

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[–] clb92@feddit.dk 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yeah, but organized into as many threads as there are issues/PRs, so it’s exactly as daunting as the same list as viewed on GitHub/project/issues (because it is exactly the same content).

Surely, dedicated tools for managing/tracking issues give you better tools for triaging, filtering, planning and such, compared to a mail client...

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[–] psycotica0@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 year ago

You're almost not wrong, but I think what you're discounting is how much power a lot of email clients have. Especially the "old" ones. People were hanging out on mailing lists before the web existed, so there's a lot of tooling in there around filtering, tagging, flagging, etc.

Remember flags? That feature of mail clients that's like "why would I use this?", or smart folders, that feature of mail clients that allows you to use a pre-written and saved search filter and browse it like a folder? These were written at a time when the email client was the social communication interface.

And if something in there should be insufficient, you can always write a script or something that interfaces with email as an API of sorts.

While it's true that a dedicated tool could be good, in a sense the email client is a dedicated tool for this, and importantly it's one that I control on the client side to do anything I need it to, regardless of whether or not anyone else on earth needs it to do this. My email client serves me.

Quick addendum before people come for me: I claimed email was "the" social communication tool. Yeah yeah IRC gets a say here, but we can all agree it's different. And then also newsgroups, but I don't want to open that can of worms. Just know that you've been named.

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[–] u_tamtam@programming.dev 1 point 1 year ago

Why would you think so? Can you give examples of specific tools that wouldn't be available to mail clients? On the other hand, there are many things available on most email clients which are missing on GitHub, like tagging automation from custom and flexible rules, Turing-complete filtering, instant searching, saved searches, managing the lifecycle of issues, linking with the VCS etc. all in context and in one place.
How people generally go about re-implementing those on GitHub is with bots, and you are left at the mercy of what the bot can do/its admin wants you to do, and each project is its own silo and possibly breaks your workflow.

I'm fine with GitHub because these days I'm mostly a casual contributor, but there's a lost appreciation for the sheer power and universality of email-based workflows. That the largest projects (including the Linux kernel) run on that should speak for itself.