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.

3 points

It would have to be a pretty niche project with an involved and dedicated community to get away with that these days.

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3 points

Yeah super niche projects like the Linux Kernel and Git

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1 point
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4 points

To be fair, at least the kernel is super niche in terms of development.

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5 points

I think they meant new projects starting today, not currently existing ones.

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1 point

Indeed. I wonder if LinuxNet / #linux is still around, actually. That was interesting back in the day, and later meeting many of the characters at conferences and meetups. IRC was great. Patches by email, otoh… Good that it is possible, but PRs/MRs are nicer.

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6 points

Personally I am comfortable with that as long as there is a public git repo. An issue tracker is the one thing I’d miss the most. I think how well this goes down will greatly depend on the project’s target audience.
notmuch is a project that I follow closely and very occasionally contribute to that works this way.

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3 points

I’m too old young to deal with this. Probably wouldn’t contribute

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1 point

Same. Presented with those options, I just don’t contribute 🤷

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11 points
*

One issue with IRC is that there’s no archiving by default. That means discussions and context for decisions are lost. This can be fixed, though. But the default setup for social chat isn’t optimal for project planning.

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3 points

That’s where any sort of forum would work much better, in my opinion. Also, unlike mails with 8+ replies, it’s much easier to follow and organize

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2 points

I don’t necessarily think this has anything to do with mails per se but with the way people use them, which nowadays is just top post all the things

This is not a problem inherent to mail though. If you look at some thread on Lemmy or reddit, you essentially see the same problem. A user posts a long text or comment and makes four, five points that would warrant addressing further. Ideally, you would craft four, five answers and post them as four, five replies, thus giving the discussion a nice structure. What happens instead is that people craft one long reply and keep the mud balling rolling.

Good communication is almost never a question of technology I’d argue.

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6 points

I think it’s super based. All these clowns talking about open source while using Discord and GitHub (yes, that’s me included). You want to submit a bug report to Git itself? Well, you gotta send a bug report to the mailing list. Then some guy will be like “oh shit can you fix it also?” and I’m like “haha no” so the dude submits a fix himselg within 4 hours, and obtains the raging hard boner of internet developer clout

Great system, pgp keys are actually useful. And everyone knows you have to be at least an 8/10 in handsomeness to be running an IRC server. Also, Matrix is trash, I’m serious, modern IRC is cool

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1 point

What do you dislike about Matrix?

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1 point

Oh it’s just an over complicated pile of low quality stuff. Still substantially behind XMPP, which was a fine solution. Somehow still behind IRCv3 in terms of raw usability and apps too. IRCv3 is a new spec that made a lot of improvements

I investigated all three in depth and decided IRCv3 is what I want to use for my server / apps. I even run a public web client that acts like Discord. IRC has the bigger communities still

If you really care about encryption, maybe there’s a reason you’d do something different, but I just want private chat servers with good UX

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