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Software Freedom Conservancy: Give Up GitHub: The Time Has Come!

Software Freedom Conservancy: Give Up GitHub: The Time Has Come!

Posted Jul 1, 2022 17:32 UTC (Fri) by mpldr (guest, #154861)
In reply to: Software Freedom Conservancy: Give Up GitHub: The Time Has Come! by bluca
Parent article: Software Freedom Conservancy: Give Up GitHub: The Time Has Come!

I agree in so far that especially for code reviews a UI is needed… at least for seeing all comments at once, in most cases switching to email was rather painfree for me. The only thing somewhat new was using send-email and am correctly.


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Software Freedom Conservancy: Give Up GitHub: The Time Has Come!

Posted Jul 1, 2022 17:51 UTC (Fri) by bluca (subscriber, #118303) [Link] (11 responses)

Responding to old threads before being subscribed (most mailing list archives do not show message-id so even if you know what that is, you can't reply), tracking status of things, mountains of spam, corporate email servers mangling plain text emails, etc - these are all extremely painful to do with projects using emails, and trivially easy and intuitive to do on Github or Gitlab

Software Freedom Conservancy: Give Up GitHub: The Time Has Come!

Posted Jul 1, 2022 22:34 UTC (Fri) by mpldr (guest, #154861) [Link] (10 responses)

> most mailing list archives do not show message-id so even if you know what that is, you can't reply

The message ID is usually in the URL, but (at least nowadays) there's usually a "Reply to thread" Button.

> tracking status of things

That's kind of a "you" problem. Some people do, and some people don't. And those who don't can usually follow better through the WebUI and use the aforementioned Reply to thread button

> mountains of spam

Reject text/html and you don't have spam.

> corporate email servers mangling plain text emails

What in the everloving bleep?! No mailserver should modify an emails content unless there's good reason (like a virus) because that will mess up PGP or – in corpo world – S/MIME signatures, so I somewhat doubt there's a lot of this behaviour.

Software Freedom Conservancy: Give Up GitHub: The Time Has Come!

Posted Jul 1, 2022 22:56 UTC (Fri) by bluca (subscriber, #118303) [Link] (7 responses)

> The message ID is usually in the URL, but (at least nowadays) there's usually a "Reply to thread" Button.

Most mailing list archives I see have neither.

> That's kind of a "you" problem. Some people do, and some people don't. And those who don't can usually follow better through the WebUI and use the aforementioned Reply to thread button

Well no, it's not a 'me' problem. It's blinding obvious if you open a PR on Github whether it has been merged or not. Instead open a random patch email on a mailing list archive and try to guess.

> Reject text/html and you don't have spam.

Have you actually ever seen a mailing list? I'm starting to doubt it, with statements like that.

> What in the everloving bleep?! No mailserver should modify an emails content unless there's good reason (like a virus) because that will mess up PGP or – in corpo world – S/MIME signatures, so I somewhat doubt there's a lot of this behaviour.

What they 'should' do according to you is irrelevant - vast majority of corporate email servers do exactly that, and there's diddly squat you can do about it as an employee.

Software Freedom Conservancy: Give Up GitHub: The Time Has Come!

Posted Jul 2, 2022 9:16 UTC (Sat) by ddevault (subscriber, #99589) [Link] (4 responses)

Since this thread is ostensibly about SourceHut, I can comment on the specifics of SourceHut's mailing list UI. We have a "reply to thread" button, and we also have a "forward this thread to me" button, which both make it pretty easy to participate in old discussions. We also have mbox exports for the past 30 days of a list, or the complete archives, which you can pull into your mail client and retro-actively filter into folders or whatever you wish.

SourceHut also tracks the review status of patches:

https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/hare-dev/patches/

We also take responsibility for managing spam across the whole site, and remove that burden from list maintainers. Spam is exceedingly rare on SourceHut -- I think I've only ever seen one spam email make it past our filters in the past 3 years.

Software Freedom Conservancy: Give Up GitHub: The Time Has Come!

Posted Jul 3, 2022 13:45 UTC (Sun) by vimpostor (guest, #159442) [Link] (3 responses)

> SourceHut also tracks the review status of patches: https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/hare-dev/patches/

That looks really nice, but I wonder how does Sourcehut actually know whether a patch is applied?
Surely it can only reliably detect this, if you apply using the web interface.

I however like to apply from the command line and sometimes edit the patch before applying for some minor code style changes. Obviously this changes the patch, so how would Sourcehut know in that case that the patch was applied?

Software Freedom Conservancy: Give Up GitHub: The Time Has Come!

Posted Jul 3, 2022 13:55 UTC (Sun) by ddevault (subscriber, #99589) [Link] (2 responses)

Right now it's done semi-manually. You can change the patchset status through special email headers (I have my mail client configured to add these when I reply to say "thanks" for the patch), or through the API.

But we intend to make it automatic. The essential heuristic is the commit date, which matches the Date header and survives amending and rebasing.

Software Freedom Conservancy: Give Up GitHub: The Time Has Come!

Posted Jul 3, 2022 15:17 UTC (Sun) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

> The essential heuristic is the commit date, which matches the Date header and survives amending and rebasing.

Wouldn't the author date be the one to trust?

Software Freedom Conservancy: Give Up GitHub: The Time Has Come!

Posted Jul 3, 2022 15:35 UTC (Sun) by ddevault (subscriber, #99589) [Link]

Right, my mistake.

Software Freedom Conservancy: Give Up GitHub: The Time Has Come!

Posted Jul 2, 2022 23:48 UTC (Sat) by mpldr (guest, #154861) [Link] (1 responses)

> Well no, it's not a 'me' problem. It's blinding obvious if you open a PR on Github whether it has been merged or not. Instead open a random patch email on a mailing list archive and try to guess.

I'd say the Linux kernel, Git, various GNU projects, and pretty much all Sourcehut projects tell a different story.

> Have you actually ever seen a mailing list? I'm starting to doubt it, with statements like that.

Sourcehut lists (chef's kiss), Mailman, Google Groups… I got around a bit and I may not have seen all possible solutions but at least some.

> What they 'should' do according to you is irrelevant - vast majority of corporate email servers do exactly that, and there's diddly squat you can do about it as an employee.

Then I'm just glad that I did not have the displeasure of experiencing this… it was mostly Outlook/O365 and Gmail with custom domains so far.

Software Freedom Conservancy: Give Up GitHub: The Time Has Come!

Posted Jul 3, 2022 12:20 UTC (Sun) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

> I'd say the Linux kernel, Git, various GNU projects, and pretty much all Sourcehut projects tell a different story.

I beg to differ. I didn't know *my own patches* had been pulled until I manually did a `log --author=` check out of curiosity and found my patches had finally made it. This is with Linux and Git at least.

Software Freedom Conservancy: Give Up GitHub: The Time Has Come!

Posted Jul 3, 2022 13:01 UTC (Sun) by brunowolff (guest, #71160) [Link] (1 responses)

> What in the everloving bleep?! No mailserver should modify an emails content unless there's good reason (like a virus) because that will mess up PGP or – in corpo world – S/MIME signatures, so I somewhat doubt there's a lot of this behaviour.

I complain about this every couple of months. We use o365 and have enabled Safelinks. Safelinks corrupts email messages to make what appear to be URLs, proxy URLs for the same resource. It does this in at least text/html and text/plain parts. The replacement has a pattern that you can use to undo this in your mail reader (using a preprocessing script) with a low false positive rate. Another broken feature o365 has is temporarily replacing attachments with dummy ones while the original attachments are being scanned for viruses. If you notice this in time, you can go back and undelete the message (even if it was expunged) and get the attachment after it has been cleared. There are other broken features of this service not related to corrupting messages as well. I think they intentionally support only limited uses for email, which they think are common and don't care much about whatever they break for less common cases. Good luck trying to get an exception from your security people to opt out of this brokenness, even if your your case, the threat is extremely small and the brokenness causes more grief on average. They is more brokenness coming. They recently notified people about an attachment blocking feature that purports to block attachments of types on a blocklist, without providing a definition of how they determine the types of attachments. They don't say if they use Content-Type, Content-Disposition (from filename) and/or actually scan the attachment to determine the type, nor how that data actually maps to their list which were not standard mime type names. For people using the web interface there is more brokenness related to charset and no support for format=flowed.

Software Freedom Conservancy: Give Up GitHub: The Time Has Come!

Posted Jul 8, 2022 5:47 UTC (Fri) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

tl;dr: email is dead, get over it.

It became very clear a long time ago when Outlook killed bottom-posting.


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