Debian discusses Discourse

Posted Apr 22, 2020 11:05 UTC (Wed) by tao (subscriber, #17563)
In reply to: Debian discusses Discourse by Cyberax
Parent article: Debian discusses Discourse

So, a rather vast variety of different e-mail clients that aren't braindead are "niche software" (all of which you can choose from when you contribute to a project using e-mail for patch submission). But a project using Discourse, for instance, allows you to pick your browser, that's it. You cannot pick your editor, you cannot pick syntax highlighting, setup filtering rules, priorities, etc.

I admit, I haven't used Discourse. I've used various other collaboration tools though; Gerrit, Gitlab, Github, Teams, Sourceforge (back when people actually used that), and Slack.

I really like Slack (but it's non-free), Teams is similar (also non-free), Gerrit is OK as long as nothing is rebased--at which points it turns into a nightmare, Gitlab & Github are OK:ish, Sourceforge was crap back when I used it.

The system I've liked the most though is simply Debian's combination of mailing lists and the BTS. It's certainly not ideal in every aspect, but it's really, really easy to customise to your liking.

The big issue these days with e-mail based interaction is simply that most ISPs actively work against you--they want you to use GMail or their own inferior copy there-of; they don't want you to download your e-mail and read it locally, and they definitely don't want you to send e-mail from your local machine using anything else than a web browser.

Debian discusses Discourse

Posted Apr 22, 2020 14:06 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (2 responses)

> setup filtering rules, priorities, etc.

These two you can. Far better than a mailing list too. For instance, I get only the first message of a thread for most of the areas of our Discourse instances. Some I watch all traffic. Still others I basically ignore and I get no notifications. My split is unlikely to match other folks' preferences. I have no idea how to do that sanely for a mailing list without having a list per Discourse section which sounds like an absolute nightmare. Or everyone reverse engineers headers and hopes they can write rules to filter on them (gmail has no support for header-based filtering outside the 3 or 4 fields they index).

Debian discusses Discourse

Posted Apr 22, 2020 16:29 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

> Or everyone reverse engineers headers and hopes they can write rules to filter on them (gmail has no support for header-based filtering outside the 3 or 4 fields they index).

So you have described two problems:

1) the admins of the various discourse boards configured them to not include the name of the boards in the notification emails. (It defaults to being included, btw)

2) Gmail sucks. (and water is wet)

Debian discusses Discourse

Posted Apr 22, 2020 16:43 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

I know gmail sucks. I filter what I can, but it is broad brushstrokes because they're so tedious to manage and edit. And yes, the subject is there, but AFAIK, there's no way to say "subject starts with (except "Re:" prefixes)" to match *just* that part of the message. I always ended up with filters labeling things with 2 or 3 labels because the *rest* of the subject had the Magic Words.