Say you want to contribute to a project and find out the only way to do so is by discussing the issue on IRC or the mailing list, then submitting the patch per email.
I spent a lot of time and energy doing that years ago and don’t want to do it anymore. Mailing lists suck because you’re subscribed to a billion things you don’t want to hear about. IRC…honestly…the world has just moved past it.
I’m sad the world moved past IRC. It was always chock full of tech geniuses and underground nerd shit. The normies can have discord
I’m still amazed that people consider proprietary app Discord the successor to IRC
This is my sentiment too and I asked the question because I was surprised that some new projects were actually being started with exactly these 2 dinosaurs. It felt offputting - as if they were trying to keep people away.
Lemmy doesn’t support questionnaires, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the majority of those who like those 2 technologies were 40+, maybe even 50+.
it wouldn’t surprise me if the majority of those who like those 2 technologies were 40+, maybe even 50+.
I don’t think it should surprise anyone if people with more experience and skills are more comfortable with simple tools than the rest of us. They’ve had more time to find good workflows for those tools, after all.
It might be more interesting to ask why people prefer any one comms method over another. For example, do they like irc/email because they’re old dogs who can’t learn new tricks, or because those are open systems that can’t be taken over by some greedy corporation?
more comfortable with simple tools than the rest of us
That really depends on your definition of “simple”. Swimming across a river is simple, but hard. All you need is your body. Using a boat is easy, but complicated (you need to know how to drive a boat). So yeah, it’s “simple” but it’s not easy, IMO.
To anyone interested, there is a comprehensive tutorial about how to use Git with email to contribute to projects like these.
Agree with many of the other comments here saying that they’d be very wary of such a project based on what these choices say about the project’s maintainers. Something else is that while I have real affection for email and particularly IRC based on past experience, I don’t think these two are without problems. Email is so asynchronous that many folks feel obligated to treat writing messages to a list more formally. This is not totally misguided since everyone subscribed gets this message delivered to them. IRC, on the other hand, is so synchronous that you should reasonably worry if anyone will be there to talk with, and about whether or not there are searchable archives.
Something (like GitHub) that can be quick but is also perfectly serviceable for asynchronous communication really does have advantages, imho.
Mailing lists intimidate me but I haven’t ever tried to communicate by one. IRC is probably fine.
I’ll be honest though, I’m not going to submit a patch to a mailing list unless there are pretty clear and easy instructions. Forking a project and opening a pull request on whatever forge (like GitHub, GitLab, and others) is easy. I probably do it once every three months or so when I find a bug I know I can fix. Mailing lists are just enough trouble (with my current level of understanding) that I’m probably not going to do it.
I’ll give an example. I found a bug in the JDK that was fixed in 17 but not in 11 and I was trying to figure out how to report it or backport it myself. It was crazy the amount of hoops I needed to jump through and I gave up. I’m not saying the project should be different so it fits my needs or anything, I’m just using this as an example of hurdles discouraging me from contributing. I think the vast majority of devs are probably at the same place and don’t want to fool with mailing lists. (I’m not saying projects should stop using them.)
IRC is fine, so are mailing lists; I use both, plus various git forges, to contribute to open source projects.
IRC is still going strong on OFTC and Libera.chat
I get that the younger folks like discord, but seriously it’s a proprietary mess that locks everything behind a wall and tries to extract payment from each and every user.
If you host thelounge using IRC is quite cool. As you get a better experience with backed up messages and stuff.
Lounge looks pretty cool
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I totally agree longterm projects are better off using github or email.
Here is the crux for lively discussions using discord/IRC comes more natural. But whilst it facilitates easier flowing communication it fails to preserve it.
IRC and email work fine for me. Leagues better than having it locked away behind Discord’s policies and whims.
An issue/patch tracker (and maybe a wiki) would be nice, but I don’t feel they’re necessary. The linux kernel manages without them, after all.
I agree with those saying mailing lists are intimidating. I don’t know if others are using dedicated tools or something but I find web based mailing list UIs just incomprehensibly bad and difficult to navigate.
Most web-based mailing list UIs are honestly incredibly bad, but you don’t need to use them, you can choose any email client you want.
The problem with mailing lists is that no mailing list provider ever supports “subscribe to this message tree”.
As a result, either you get constant spam, or you don’t get half the replies.
I sort messages from mailing lists into different mail folders, and my client (Gnus) supports a threaded view of messages (and I can press ‘k’ on a message to mark the entire thread as read), so this isn’t a big issue for me.
If mailing lists had a view like reddit / lemmy / slashdot / hackernews, I might be more willing to use them, but that wouldn’t solve contributions for me. I have no idea how to format emails to comment on code and then follow ensuing discussions. And how would CI work?
Email how to: https://useplaintext.email
Small change:
git diff origin master > mycontribution.patchand paste it into email body.Big change: same as small, but add as attachment.
Subscribe to coreutils mailing list - low enough volume to not get overwhelmed and established enough to get a feel of the culture.
If you feel like learning more about it, there is a great tutorial available:
Both are heavy targets of spamming and take considerable effort to maintain
True for everything on the open internet though.
Case and point: https://social.anoxinon.de/@Codeberg/111080409541766357
I’m too
oldyoung to deal with this. Probably wouldn’t contributeSame. Presented with those options, I just don’t contribute 🤷
It would have to be a pretty niche project with an involved and dedicated community to get away with that these days.
This is ideal for me. I refuse to use Discord period and only use Slack only for direct client work (when they request that we use it.)
Mailing lists are great imho but I’m older than most people probably on these communities. So I’m very familiar with this.
I do think a ticket tracker is useful/required though.
I never really used IRC, but in my experience contributing to projects which use mailing lists is very easy - you just send a mail with some code.
Of course you could use git-send-email, and you could create diffs and patches, but I actually think for a new contributor the mailing list workflow is the simplest since it doesn’t actually require knowledge of the various tools experienced developers use.
I write this from personal experience BTW - the first projects I contributed to used mailing lists, which allowed me to contribute even as a self taught programmer who had no experience with any VCS yet.
Do you find mailing lists easier to use than pull requests / merge requests? And how do you find following a discussion in a mailing list?
Yes and it depends to both questions.
I participate in projects being developed on Github that have 5k+ open pull requests and the same amount of issues. At that volume of communication, the Github workflow of “clicking through stuff” is way inferior to an efficient email workflow. Essentially, your workflow turns into email anyways because its the only sane way to consume based on push, and yes, I know, you can reply to Github using email, but its not nearly as good as something made for email.
So, in my opinion, email is simpler to use that pull request. It is not easiser because it is not close to what people are used to.
At that volume of communication, the Github workflow of “clicking through stuff” is way inferior to an efficient email workflow. Essentially, your workflow turns into email anyways because its the only sane way to consume based on push (…)
I don’t agree. Any conversation on pull requests happens through issues/tickets, which already aggregate all related events and are trivially referenced through their permanent links, including through the Git repo’s history.
From a contributor point of view, mailing lists are definitely easier than pull/merge requests - you just send a patch which you can create in any way you want to an email address.
Following a discussion is easy - it’s just a list of messages. In fact, it is easier for me since I use Gnus as my email client, which gives me a threaded view of discussions on the list.
I like IRC and still use it daily to keep up with other hobbyists. Then again, vintage computers are my main hobby horse and of course those circles are gonna lean towards platforms that remain usable on a VIC-20.
I’m fine with IRC (actually prefer it as I use it all the time).
I agree with others that a mailing list is more intimidating and more of a hassle, but if there is a web archive, I can live with that. It wouldn’t be my preference, but it wouldn’t be an insurmountable barrier (I have contributed to Alpine Linux in the past via their mailing list workflow).
Would you be more or less willing to contribute code and participate in discussions if newer technologies were used?
I would be less willing to contribute/participate in discussions if newer platforms such as discord, slack, or matrix are used. Of those three, I would prefer discord, then slack, then matrix.
As it is, I only use Slack for work, and mostly avoid discord and matrix except for a few mostly dead channels/servers.
I understand that this is not the mainstream view and that most people prefer the newer platforms, but personally, I am not a fan of them nor do I use them.
Of those three, I would prefer discord, then slack, then matrix.
So #1 discord, #2 slack, and #3 matrix? Am I getting that right? Why that ranking?
It comes down to bridging. I use discord and slack via IRC bridges. I actually use slack a lot (for work), but primarily through irslackd. I do not use slack for anything outside of work and would prefer to keep it that way.
For discord, I primarily use it through bitlbee-discord. With this bridge/gateway, I can actually chat on different servers at the same time, so I wouldn’t mind this for different communities if I had to.
Matrix is last because I don’t really have a good briding solution for it and it just seems clunkier than the other two for me.
