Subject: Re: Migrate away from vger to GitHub or (on-premise) GitLab?

From: Nico Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 1 Feb 2024 11:46:39 -0600

On Thu, Feb 01, 2024 at 10:39:04AM -0500, Konstantin Ryabitsev wrote:
> [excellent discussion of e-mail workflows elided]

It would surely help if the e-mail interfaces of forges were not
terrible.  But they really have to be as good as the mailing list
approach.

I envision that the "issues" and "PRs" could be webmail-ish thread
trackers that auto-close on prolonged silence.  One could open issues/
PRs by e-mail, close them by e-mail, etc., all e-mails going to the same
[forge-run?] list address, but still have a forge-style view of a PR's
commits, still have a forge-style code review web UI (with all comments
going to e-mail too, and with e-mail being first-class, not an
afterthought), still have a CI checks UI, and still have a big
rebase-and-merge button for maintainers.

I.e., forge e-mail UI as first-class equivalent of forge web UI.

The forges tend to be run by people who prioritize users who are not
heavy e-mail workflow devs.  It makes economic sense, given how few
users demand e-mail as a first-class forge UI.  Still, it would be quite
awesome if some forge did this.

> - How to avoid a vendor lock-in? [...]

Assuming some forge exists with an e-mail UI on the same footing as its
web UI, and also good enough for kernel/git/... devs, you could maintain
mirrors on all the other forges, naturally, and always fallback on
e-mail only if the primary forge disappears or becomes too expensive.

> - How to avoid centralization and single points of failure? [...]

It's all forks, all the time.  It'd be good if the kernel maintainers
maintained non-forge git servers as mirror/staging/primary repos.

> - How to avoid alienating these hundreds of key maintainers who are now
>   extremely proficient at their query-based workflows? [...]

The only answer is to stick to the current workflow until some forge
provide an equivalently first-class e-mail interface.  New participants
just have to get used to it.  IMO.

Nico
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