On Fri, Aug 28, 2020 at 11:03:49AM +0530, Biju Chacko wrote:
I feel like *I'm* stuck in the 20th century because I still like mailing
lists. Recently when I tried to explain that for engineering discussions a
mailing list would be better than a slack channel I had to stop to explain
what a mailing list was. (!)
+1 for the love of mailing lists.
Email doesn't come naturally to a lot of people. Apparently, some
people are beginning to wonder whether this is becoming a problem for
open source projects:
https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/25/linux_kernel_email/
Reading the article, there's this thing that bothers me:
As an example, my partner submitted a patch to OpenBSD a few weeks
ago, and he had to set up an entirely new mail client which didn’t
mangle his email message to HTML-ise or do other things to it, so he
could even make that one patch. That’s a barrier to entry that’s
pretty high for somebody who may want to be a first-time contributor.
So, what's the problem here? That open-source projects use e-mail or
that e-mail is a tool and when used for technical purposes needs to be
properly set up?
It turned out, though, that this time Outlook was not guilty. “I think
it was actually Gmail that was a barrier. And he also couldn’t do it
from Apple Mail. It is just that the modern mail client has
intentionally moved towards HTML,” she said.
The modern e-mail client has intentionally moved towards HTML *and*
towards not letting the user do whatever task is actually intended,
apparently.
E-mail is simple to use. One only has to follow very old,
well-established rules; see for instance points 2.3 and 2.4 here:
https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/mailing-list-faq/etiquette.html.
The problem is that at some point someone thought it would be amazing to
have animated gifs in the middle of your message and reply 'ok' to an
entire thread from your phone. Everything went downhill from there.
/rant
Cheers,
--
José María (Chema) Mateos || https://rinzewind.org
