On Mon, 25 May 2020 at 01:33PM +0200, J Rt wrote: > > Are the patches lost because a mailing list is a bad communication > > channel, or are they lost because the maintainer does not care enough > > about the project to actually collect the patches, review them and > > integrate them? In the second case, the maintainer could equally ignore > > pull requests made through github/gitlab/whatever. > > I do not know, but I feel sympathy for the maintainer there, in the > meaning that it must be really quite hard to keep an overview of the > issues vs patches vs noisy discussions like this one ^^ .
Of course, but the mailing-list -based workflow has been decided by the maintainer, so I assume he knew what he was doing when taking this decision. > Maybe I am just very ignorant of some tools that can be coupled to > mailing lists and that can make life easier, but I can see how the > mailing-list based collaborative development workflow can become > quickly unmanageable. It's true. It very much depends on how well organized the maintainer is, and how reactive he is when a patch is submitted. > At least having everything gathered, cross-referenced, tagged, with > permalinks to the code, etc, in an issue tracker, may help a bit... I haven't participated in the development of password-store in a long while, but my understanding of the workflow is that since it's essentially completely distributed (the mailing list is centralized, but it provides no more than a broadcast channel to reach all developers), it would be every motivated contributor's responsibility to keep track of the patches (i.e., to do the things that a centralized system like github does) and of the discussion, by archiving locally all the messages from the mailing-list. This is a lot of work, and having a centralized, automated tool such as github would make it easier, but the whole point of a distributed workflow is to be decentralized, so a centralized tool would defeat the point. This way of working is of course not obvious to the people who join the mailing-list (I only became aware of it by reading the discussion in the past few days here) as there is no developer guide that tells you “keep all the emails you receive from the mailing list, because there is no searchable, centralized archive”. > But may be wrong of course. Not necessarily. I'm not aware of decentralized tools that would provide the same features as github (ticgit/be/git-bug would provide decentralized ticketing systems with comments, I'm not sure how to handle pull-requests). Also, a fully distributed workflow would require each contributor to publish its patches in a publicly accessible git repository, so that anyone can pull those patches. Publishing them on the mailing-list works too, but it requires more manual work. But the main problem for this projects I guess is that there is only one maintainer (who is a central node in the network of contributors) who is not very reactive. If patches were reviewed and merged or rejected quickly, we would not be having this discussion. Matthieu -- (~._.~) Matthieu Weber - [email protected] (~._.~) ( ? ) http://weber.fi.eu.org/ ( ? ) ()- -() public key id : 0x85CB340EFCD5E0B3 ()- -() (_)-(_) "Humor ist, wenn man trotzdem lacht (Otto J. Bierbaum)" (_)-(_)
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