I, for one, would be opposed to moving these discussions off the mailing lists. Most of the "issues" are straw men.
The mailing lists are a "push" technology so I don't have to do anything special to get the info since my mail client is always on when my computer is on. I do not, and will not, place my code on a platform that is ruled by fiat by an organization as fickle and error prone as Microsoft. Hence, I seldom access anything on GitHub and will not receive any of the discussions if they move there and I have to do another sign-on to retrieve (and attempt to find) the information. In my experience GitHub is not a user friendly place and it IS NOT easy to find ANYTHING there. I don't see any issue with formatting or searching in mailing lists. Maybe users need a better mail client or something. Just my $.02. On Fri, Aug 20, 2021 at 3:27 AM Sebastian Stenzel < sebastian.sten...@gmail.com> wrote: > I am among the younger people here on the mailing lists (at least I think > so) and I can very much relate to what Michael suggests. So here is my > personal answer to the _why_ question: > > Mailing lists create an enormous barrier to external devs like myself who > are willing to contribute: > * Signing up to a means of the 80s feels just strange > * Signing up to _any_ additional tool is deterring (same holds true for > JBS), especially when you're used to low-threshold contributions to other > projects can be > * Therefore, signing up feels like a liability that you may not want to > commit to, if you merely want to express your support for a single comment > * It can be hard to find the correct mailing list for the topic you want > to discuss > * You'll > * either receive digests and miss a topic you're interested in > * or dozens of additional mails each day, alienating people who just > want to follow specific discussions > * No proper formatting > * No proper linking to code, issues, PRs, ... > * Hard to track diverging discussions > * Very hard to search - I basically need to use Google and restrict the > search to some mail archive > * Linking to different topics means you need to either quote the whole > thing or link to an archive > > On the other hand I see one important argument against GitHub Discussions: > We have no control over how Discussions will change in the future. Even if > they seem suitable today, we can't tell if it may be necessary to switch to > yet another tool in 5 years. Each time you switch, you strip connections to > discussions that took place on the previous platform. Switching tools > always comes with a commitment to it and bears this risk. > >
