> Almost everyone has a web browser installed. Not everyone has a MUA installed.
It shouldn't be an issue to install one. A somewhat related example I recently came across was when I had to install Google chrome to use a feature of Slack that wasn't supported in Firefox. To get around that issue, I installed chrome. If I had to, I would have also had to set up the necessary proxy configuration for that browser to work (though that wasn't the actually the case).
Similarly, if one wants to contribute to a project that requires emailed patch files, then part of the process should be installing and setting up a MUA if the web based front-end doesn't work properly.
> This was the step I missed, thanks. This could work. You now need to keep your patches around, but it could work.
I think it's easier than having to retrieve the original message via IMAP, POP, or HTTP and copying its message-id value :)
> I meant stable across local changes to the commit. I didn't realize you were serializing this commit hash to some file and fetching it from the file later.
Typically, when contributors do a re-roll of a patch set, they effectively either use git commit --amend or git rebase to update the commits in the branch they're working on. The updated patchset is sent to the mailing list and pulled down by reviewers and applied to their working tree (which results in a commit with the same change, but a different SHA1). This is unlike the case where one runs git fetch or git pull and pulls down the commits and gets the commits with the same SHA1 applied to their local copy.
In other words, the SHA1 value isn't that important other than to serve as a unique value of the message-id header.
> You can use email effectively without a local email client, however.
I use both web based clients (hotmail, gmail) and a locally installed MUA (thunderbird). I can say that I have a better user experience with the MUA compared to the web based front ends.
For the purposes of patch submission, reviewing, etc, I think that web based clients are really not sufficient due to the lack of threading (as I would see it in a traditional email client).
> it's that you're asking people to effectively change their entire workflow for interacting with email just so that they can contribute.
There are a number of steps one has to take to contribute to a project. Reading documentation, installing the software, documenting the bug they're proposing to fix, discussing the approach with project maintainers, implementing the change, testing the change, submitting the fix, responding to reviews, etc.
Just submitting the patch is a small part of the overall process. For example, a contributer would have to set up the development environment such that they can run the tests that come with the project. That in itself could be a bit more work than figuring out how to use git send-email to submit the patches.
> MUAs are harder to set up. Refer to aforementioned points about blocked ports, confusing IMAP/POP3 deletion semantics
It's easy enough to see whether or not ports are blocked by attempting to connect to the SMTP, POP/IMAP servers. As for the "confusing [...] deletion semantics", I have never encountered an issue where I accidentally deleted all my email in the last 22 some years of using email while using my local MUA.
> It shouldn't be an issue to install one. A somewhat related example I recently came across was when I had to install Google chrome to use a feature of Slack that wasn't supported in Firefox. To get around that issue, I installed chrome. If I had to, I would have also had to set up the necessary proxy configuration for that browser to work (though that wasn't the actually the case).
Firefox and Chrome are one-click setup, and the workflows are similar. Web based email is very different from local email. You need to decide a bunch of things on setup -- which folders do you want to sync? How does deletion work? The deletion model -- what happens when you delete a local message (and how to push local "deletions" to the server) -- is not at all obvious and confusing to configure. You get double notifications unless you configure that as well. Understand that people interact differently with email; so while it's easy to use web clients (and phone clients based on the web client which provide a uniform UI), matching your email provider's features and functionality with that of the MUA, and then working it into your personal workflow is tedious and confusing. GMail in particular behaves quite differently from what MUAs expect (labels are one example). Browsers on the other hand operate on largely the same model.
Overall MUAs involve a significant change in workflow. You can of course set them up for "just patch mailing lists" and continue to use your existing workflow for everything else. I've done this, and it's super annoying, especially if you intend to contribute long term. Both I and a lot of folks I know tend to restrict themselves to the commandline+browser+optional editor, having a second place in a completely different app to deal with email for just one project is just not worth it.
The issue with proxy configs is that proxy configs are often documented for browsers but can't always be set up the same way for MUAs, especially because SMTP is not an HTTP port and won't work without HTTP CONNECT tunneling with HTTP proxies (setting this up is horrible). And, again, port blocking.
> I can say that I have a better user experience with the MUA compared to the web based front ends.
I didn't say that MUAs aren't better, I said that you can handle things effectively with web based clients. This is not true of lynx, for example. This means that many potential contributors will never have used MUAs, but will have definitely used non-commandline browsers.
> There are a number of steps one has to take to contribute to a project.
Sure. And projects should strive to make these steps easier too. I have helped folks (not just new programmers, mind you) get involved in open source, and the rest of these steps are fine for them, but needed lots of help with the mail client setup for contributing to the mailing list.
> It's easy enough to see whether or not ports are blocked by attempting to connect to the SMTP, POP/IMAP servers.
Yes, but if ports are blocked, you're hosed. The question isn't if you can find out if ports are blocked, it's what to do when they are. Mail ports are blocked by many shared networks because it's easy for one malicious entity to start sending spam, getting the IP blacklisted, affecting legitimate email. It's sometimes possible that IMAPS (993) is open, but you need to know to look for that and try to use it.
> I have never encountered an issue where I accidentally deleted all my email in the last 22 some years of using email while using my local MUA.
Yes, but it's not obvious that this is the case, and that's where the confusion stems from. Folks will be afraid of using a tool that they think may potentially destroy their email.
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It really shouldn't be hard for a hybrid approach here. Have a mailing list with a web interface. A good one, with formatting for patches, and the ability to participate online with finer control over email. There shouldn't be web features that can't be used just as easily for those used to a mail interface. This still has the problem that you still need to copy patches, but it's much better than what's out there now.
Github sort of already does this, but in the opposite direction -- it's a web based tool that you can interact with from the commandline (via hub) and email (in discussions). However, you can't do reviews from email (so the "no web features that can't be used from email" isn't true). Then again, I find email-based reviews to be very lacking compared to what can be done directly on github or the review tools folks integrate with it.
Not necessarily. There are extensions to set up, proxies to set up if you're behind a firewall, etc.
> [Local email] You need to decide a bunch of things on setup
That may apply in a few special cases, but every time I set up Thunderbird or any other MUA, the only things I have to enter are the SMTP and IMAP servers along with my credentials. Thunderbird will even auto-detect those settings (other than one's credentials) for the more common set ups.
Then it's just a matter of waiting for all the messages to download and populate the folders. Because of IMAP preserving the flags that I set on messages from my old client, the new client can already tell if I've read certain messages, marked them as important, etc.
> The deletion model -- what happens when you delete a local message (and how to push local "deletions" to the server) -- is not at all obvious and confusing to configure.
I've never had that problem using the default configuration that Thunderbird comes with for IMAP. When you delete a message, it's marked with the expunge flag, IIRC and will be deleted when you end the IMAP session. Some servers will allow you to recover those messages if you mistakenly delete them. If you're using POP (and not many people use that AFIAK, at least compared to IMAP), then there's an option as to whether to delete messages from the server when you download them.
> Sure. And projects should strive to make these steps easier too. I have helped folks (not just new programmers, mind you) get involved in open source, and the rest of these steps are fine for them, but needed lots of help with the mail client setup for contributing to the mailing list.
I think there's just a fundamental difference in opinion here. Many people, including myself, learned a lot of what they know by experimenting, reading documentation/articles, asking around, etc. They didn't need to have somoene guide them step-by-step in order to complete a task. They would read guides and then expand their knowledge based on what they read.
> Yes, but if ports are blocked, you're hosed.
In the case of email, that would just include port 25 which is unsecured SMTP. No one should be transmitting their credentials in plain text over an unsecured connection. Ports for secure transports (SMTP, IMAP, etc.) aren't typically blocked by residential ISPs. They may be blocked in a company's corporate network, but that doesn't mean they can't compose their messages at work and then send them off once they get home and can use their home network connection.
> It really shouldn't be hard for a hybrid approach here.
I agree. One can use git format-patch and git send-email to actually send patches to the email list (and CC any maintainers who wrote the code they're modifying). They can participate in a review discussion via their preferred way of accessing their email. If they need to post a follow up patch series, they will need to access the message-id of the original message (unless the idea of generating and retrieving the message-id I mentioned above is implemented) and use git format-patch and git send-email to send the follow up series.
> Then again, I find email-based reviews to be very lacking compared to what can be done directly on github or the review tools folks integrate with it.
I've found Github, in particular, to be rather lacking in terms of code review. For example, it has collapsed comments made on lines of code that happened to change, but not in a way related to the comments made on them. It doesn't have a way to thread comments (meaning that you cannot automatically associate a reply with its parent comment that happens to be several comments away from the most recent one made on a PR. There's no way to know whether your review has been addressed without having to scroll all over the PR page to find your comment (which may disappear if someone does a git force push to push up an amended commit or rebased branch).
With email, it's pretty easy to see whether a thread has new messages, whether someone has replied to a message, or that there are messages you haven't replied to. Also, given the thread overview pane that a MUA has, it's far easier to have a more extensive discussion without requiring an excessive amount of scolling/paging. In a github PR, it starts to get rather unwieldy and require a lot of scrolling once you get beyond 10 to 15 comments.
Some review tools like gerrit, phabricator, reviewboard, and others do address these issues to some degree, but they themselves take more time to learn, install and configure compared to an email client and configuring the git email related utilities.
> Not necessarily. There are extensions to set up, proxies to set up if you're behind a firewall, etc.
Default, basic workflow is the same though. For email, this doesn't map well, since everyone has a different workflow; there's not really a "default". And most if not all web-based contribution workflows don't force you to switch browsers (sometimes you may have a couple improvement features on other browsers, but that's not prohibitive), so this discussion is moot anyway.
Proxies are much easier to set up for browsers as I mentioned earlier.
> When you delete a message, it's marked with the expunge flag, IIRC and will be deleted when you end the IMAP session.
Right, but I also don't want to store all my emails locally, just the recent ones, and it's unclear how to do that without getting them deleted. Thunderbird in particular gets very confusing about this (the OSX Mail app is clearer). The first time I set up Thunderbird it synced everything. I didn't want that (I realized that it was going to download my gigabytes of email after it started syncing); but was too afraid to delete the older messages. I eventually went with deleting the profile dir and starting over. This is not just me, multiple people I know have been through similar confusions when setting up.
And, again, none of this is obvious.
"I've never had that problem" misses the point; the point is not that it works a certain way, it's that it's confusing and nonobvious and very easily can turn people off contributing that way.
> I think there's just a fundamental difference in opinion here. Many people, including myself, learned a lot of what they know by experimenting, reading documentation/articles, asking around, etc. They didn't need to have somoene guide them step-by-step in order to complete a task. They would read guides and then expand their knowledge based on what they read.
This is how I learn as well. I too am self-taught. But there are many people who do not have the time to learn things by blundering along. Reducing friction wherever possible is something I care about deeply. Not everyone does, but I do try to convince others to strive for the same.
> Ports for secure transports (SMTP, IMAP, etc.) aren't typically blocked by residential ISPs.
Yes, but people live in universities, or other large shared NAT networks, which often blanket port block. I'm not saying that these policies are reasonable, I'm just pointing out the reality of the situation.
And SMTP is what you need to use git send-email, which is what the original discussion was about.
> Default, basic workflow is the same though. For email, this doesn't map well, since everyone has a different workflow; there's not really a "default".
While that is true, I don't see it as an issue. Project documentation can suggest a workflow, but people who regularly contribute can optimize/change it for their convenience. What really matters is what works for the project maintainers and core contributors.
For example, at my current job, we have an established workflow for implementing changes in our code base, reviewing those changes and deploying them to our production systems. If I were to switch jobs, I would have to adapt to the workflow at my new job. I wouldn't try to shoehorn in the workflow used at my current job into my new job. But I would try to suggest improvements to the workflow based on my experience and see if I can get others to adopt them. But if they don't change, then I either have to deal wit it, or find another job. Similarly, if a potential contributor isn't willing to deal with the established workflow of a given project, they're free to contribute to a project that has a workflow more to their liking.
> Right, but I also don't want to store all my emails locally, just the recent ones, and it's unclear how to do that without getting them deleted.
I don't really see it as a problem. I have an email account that was provisioned roughly 8 years ago and the total folder size is around 1.2 GB (which is pretty insignificant in terms of disk space these days). I don't typically delete emails and can easily find messages sent to me from that long ago if I so wish using the search features of my MUA.
But getting to your other point about not wanting to sync the entire set of emails, it's not something that I have to deal with more often than I end up setting up a new computer (which has been twice in the last 5 years or so).
> it's confusing and nonobvious and very easily can turn people off contributing that way.
There are certain expectations that each project has in terms of contributing and I have seen a lot of complaints over the years where people post code, but never follow up with the maintainer. Perhaps having an email based process forces those who are willing to be more involved in the process, and discourages those who just want to drop code off and be done with it (without ever following up).
> But there are many people who do not have the time to learn things by blundering along.
I wouldn't call it "blundering". It's a learning experience. If someone isn't willing to to put the time into independently learning (with assistance as needed) something, then perhaps it's not really worth their time (or yours). I'm much more willing to work with people who, after showing them the basics, come back to me and actually show me something that I didn't know about as opposed to the person who appears to be burdened by the fact that I'm teaching them the basics and has no time to go further in their learning process. The same applies to project maintainers.
> Yes, but people live in universities, or other large shared NAT networks, which often blanket port block.
The only time I've encountered this problem is at my current job where they block access to external email services when connected to the corporate network. I don't bother logging into my personal email accounts at work though. People, if they're motivated enough can get around those restrictions. Perhaps, if there's a blanket port block, they could submit things by connecting to their email server via their cell phone/mobile connection.
> Project documentation can suggest a workflow, but people who regularly contribute can optimize/change it for their convenience. What really matters is what works for the project maintainers and core contributors.
Workflow for interacting with a project is different from workflow for interacting with email, a central tool to the rest of our lives. Git workflow is malleable. If I have to change my email workflow to contribute to your project, I probably just won't contribute, or contribute less. I'm a committer to gdb, but this is one of the reasons I dread putting up patches and often procrastinate. I have an unsynced MUA locally which I do use, but I still don't like it.
Like I said, you can make it so that you only use the mail client for patch contributions, but that feels heavyweight. I've tried that (indeed, it's what I currently do), and it's really annoying.
> I don't really see it as a problem. I have an email account that was provisioned roughly 8 years ago and the total folder size is around 1.2 GB
That's just you, though. Mine is 7GB. On my current laptop that doesn't matter. I used to be on an older laptop that didn't have much space, was partitioned and dual booted, and regularly ran out of space. 7GB was a lot.
> it's not something that I have to deal with more often than I end up setting up a new computer
But we are talking about setup. We are talking about the setup time for contributing to a project for people who don't already use MUAs.
> Perhaps having an email based process forces those who are willing to be more involved in the process, and discourages those who just want to drop code off and be done with it (without ever following up).
I think this attitude does more harm than good. I've been involved with projects with more explicit mentoring, and this has always been a net positive -- for every contributor who drive-by drops a patch, we have many more new contributors who start off clueless but end up being valuable members of the community.
> I wouldn't call it "blundering". It's a learning experience. If someone isn't willing to to put the time into independently learning (with assistance as needed) something
Not everyone can afford to sink unlimited time into things. Making it easier to use things helps these people get involved.
Besides, folks don't always approach open source project with the singular goal of contributing to that particular project. Sometimes they just want to do some open source stuff in the field of their choice to learn. If your project is annoying to get involved in, they will choose a different one -- they're still motivated, just not for your project in particular. Your project doesn't exist in a vacuum.
This is a fundamental disagreement of opinion we seem to have here -- you don't particularly care about such contributors, I do, and I think that such projects (which try hard to keep it easy to contribute) I've been involved in have benefitted tremendously from this. To each to their own, I guess.
It shouldn't be an issue to install one. A somewhat related example I recently came across was when I had to install Google chrome to use a feature of Slack that wasn't supported in Firefox. To get around that issue, I installed chrome. If I had to, I would have also had to set up the necessary proxy configuration for that browser to work (though that wasn't the actually the case).
Similarly, if one wants to contribute to a project that requires emailed patch files, then part of the process should be installing and setting up a MUA if the web based front-end doesn't work properly.
> This was the step I missed, thanks. This could work. You now need to keep your patches around, but it could work.
I think it's easier than having to retrieve the original message via IMAP, POP, or HTTP and copying its message-id value :)
> I meant stable across local changes to the commit. I didn't realize you were serializing this commit hash to some file and fetching it from the file later.
Typically, when contributors do a re-roll of a patch set, they effectively either use git commit --amend or git rebase to update the commits in the branch they're working on. The updated patchset is sent to the mailing list and pulled down by reviewers and applied to their working tree (which results in a commit with the same change, but a different SHA1). This is unlike the case where one runs git fetch or git pull and pulls down the commits and gets the commits with the same SHA1 applied to their local copy.
In other words, the SHA1 value isn't that important other than to serve as a unique value of the message-id header.
> You can use email effectively without a local email client, however.
I use both web based clients (hotmail, gmail) and a locally installed MUA (thunderbird). I can say that I have a better user experience with the MUA compared to the web based front ends.
For the purposes of patch submission, reviewing, etc, I think that web based clients are really not sufficient due to the lack of threading (as I would see it in a traditional email client).
> it's that you're asking people to effectively change their entire workflow for interacting with email just so that they can contribute.
There are a number of steps one has to take to contribute to a project. Reading documentation, installing the software, documenting the bug they're proposing to fix, discussing the approach with project maintainers, implementing the change, testing the change, submitting the fix, responding to reviews, etc.
Just submitting the patch is a small part of the overall process. For example, a contributer would have to set up the development environment such that they can run the tests that come with the project. That in itself could be a bit more work than figuring out how to use git send-email to submit the patches.
> MUAs are harder to set up. Refer to aforementioned points about blocked ports, confusing IMAP/POP3 deletion semantics
It's easy enough to see whether or not ports are blocked by attempting to connect to the SMTP, POP/IMAP servers. As for the "confusing [...] deletion semantics", I have never encountered an issue where I accidentally deleted all my email in the last 22 some years of using email while using my local MUA.