Why kernel development still uses email

Let's keep things in perspective: I didn't prepare and give a speech at a conference :-)

I think I understand the inertia, the highly efficient email shortcuts, scripts and workflows finely tuned over many years of experience, the limitations and immaturity of the current server-based alternatives... basically everything Damien said in his insightful blog post. On the other hand I really don't get the high-profile praise of the obsolete status quo when the rest of the world is moving on. That's seclusion and much more worrying. Worried that Linux is falling on the other side of this quote: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win".

> In particular, e-mail works without a network connection – you can download your
> incoming e-mail at home, write replies to it during a train or plane ride where the
> connectivity is terrible, and send the replies when you're back on the net.

Offline is a fair question. I don't know any centralized review system with a good offline mode.

- This doesn't mean it's technically impossible. For instance before bitkeeper/git/mercurial/etc. most people didn't imagine that version control could support well both servers and offline. The following Gerrit client was mentioned above; I don't know it but it seems to basically solve this problem: http://princessleia.com/journal/2014/09/offline-cli-based.... But let's pretend users prefer to stick to official, "core" tools and are not ready for (experimental?) third-party extensions.

- While not as convenient as email, it is possible to perform some work offline with systems like Gerrit thanks to... email! Not open-the-flood-gates-and-then-filter kind of email but a limited number of throw-away notifications from selected/subscribed reviews. More specifically, offline reviews involve the following phases:
1. Pre-fetch
2. Read and write replies
3. "Fire and Forget" send while still offline
# 1. and 2. can be done and are being done today thanks to email notifications.
# 3. is typically not supported without third-party extensions. Ideally it should be however note this: "Fire and Forget" / offline send can make you look silly when your reply happens to be just an incomplete and inferior version of another reply that someone else already posted while you were offline. You look even sillier in today's cloud-based / always on-line world where some people will fail to even imagine you can send while off-line.