I think having everyone see all the emails is part of the point. Even with self-hosted Gitea, someone has to _host_ it. And there isn't a trivial export button, and if the host goes rogue they can make it inaccessible and make everyone lose efficiency while they swap back to the old method.
And if you need email to authenticate on a website, why not just use email anyway?
But this is an interesting idea, and I'm on the look-out for ideas to replace email. I'll keep "LKML" in the back of my head as a use case.
> Because Email may not be the optimal user interface for handling issues, pull requests, code review, etc.
Maybe that's your experience.
Others have used mailing lists for this purpose for decades and a lot of people prefer it.
For one, it's accessible. Every machine can do plaintext email. Every text editor can work with plaintext. It's simple. Integrate it into whatever shell/editor/scripting language you prefer.
As opposed to login into to a bespoke web interface, mainly primarily designed to be friendly to novice users.
If this in true then why do so few projects use a mailing list nowadays instead of something like github.
>Every machine can do plaintext email.
Every machine can do web browsing too. More people have used a web browser on their computer than a dedicated email client (as opposed to a web app like gmail).
>As opposed to login into to a bespoke web interface
You have to log in to email too.
>mainly primarily designed to be friendly to novice users.
What's wrong with that? Having good UX is a win. The UX for creating a new repo on github is a million times better than creating a mailing list (yes I have set up a mailing list for a project I made and no one e ended up using it except for me. Meanwhile I had much more success with getting people to join and discuss the project via Discord)
> If this in true then why do so few projects use a mailing list nowadays instead of something like github.
Lot's of projects use mailing lists. Lot's of projects use web-based git hosting services. Lot's of projects mix.
Why do people just use GitHub? Because it requires zero configuration and it's convenient when you're developing something yourself.
The Linux Kernel is by far the worlds largest open source project. Consider that it might have different needs.
>> Every machine can do plaintext email.
> Every machine can do web browsing too.
You're missing the point.
A web interface is more complex than plaintext emails.
To integrate into your shell environment is a lot more complicated.
> More people have used a web browser on their computer than a dedicated email client (as opposed to a web app like gmail).
I don't understand your point.
>> As opposed to login into to a bespoke web interface
> You have to log in to email too.
The emphasis was on bespoke web interface, not logging in.
>>mainly primarily designed to be friendly to novice users.
>What's wrong with that?
Fast and flexible are sacrificed. Ie. it's more convenient for the people who don't use the system all the time (people filing bug-reports) vs. the people who actually use it all the time (maintainers)
> yes I have set up a mailing list for a project I made and no one e ended up using it except for me
a tad different use-case to the development of the linux kernel it seems
> Meanwhile I had much more success with getting people to join and discuss the project via Discord
> Isn't this also a problem if the person managing the email list goes rogue? You have to trust someone to host the infrastructure.
It depends on what kind of threat you are worried about. The beautiful thing is even if LKML was abused and ruined tomorrow, nothing is lost or damaged. The emails have already been sent, and moving to a new list is more of a nuisance at this point.
If you're worried about authenticating a patch series, committers can sign their commits a number of ways.
Lastly, a large chunk of Linux development happens off-list, with subsystem maintainers building branches for Linus or Greg to pull from.
And if you need email to authenticate on a website, why not just use email anyway?
But this is an interesting idea, and I'm on the look-out for ideas to replace email. I'll keep "LKML" in the back of my head as a use case.