Date: Sun, 19 Apr 2020 11:04:13 +0200
From: David Demelier <markand@malikania.fr>
To: ~alpine/devel@lists.alpinelinux.org
Subject: Re: mailing lists, processes, modernization
Message-ID: <20200419090413.GA4104@kiwi.home>
References: <66694f73048e047cadbe9e3f715801d8@dereferenced.org>
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On Sat, Apr 18, 2020 at 03:48:25AM +0000, Ariadne Conill wrote:
> This lead to Drew DeVault proposing that Alpine use his Sourcehut platform
> for mailing lists, which we have used for the past 8 months.  Initially,
> this was seen as a good solution for the original problems we were having
> with the ezmlm-based setup, but some have discontinued using the mailing
> lists, in some cases leaving the project entirely due to issues the
> Sourcehut software has processing HTML e-mail, which caused incompatibility
> with popular e-mail clients such as the Android GMail client and the iOS
> EMail client, as well as differences in behavior verses the earlier mailing
> list system involving the Sourcehut solution not mailing a copy of the
> message back to its author.

I personally use mlmmj [0], it's pretty minimalist and simple to use.
Could be nice to use to replace this one at least for other lists. And
at least it does one basic thing for a mailing list, send your own email
back.
 
> Unfortunately, this brings us to a crossroads: mailing lists that are
> boycotted by participants are not a useful communications tool for a
> project, because of the source of truth issue.  In addition, the infra
> team has expressed a desire to migrate all applications they manage to
> run under Docker, a desire not shared by Drew for the Sourcehut
> infrastructure.

I think it's useful to discuss new problematics but not for sending
patches. For example, proposals, help for development and such.

> For the support inquiries that get sent to alpine-devel and alpine-user,
> I propose that we use Discourse forums instead.  Discourse is more accessible
> to the average user, featuring mobile apps and tons of features.  Discourse
> also supports e-mail for people who still desire to interact with the system
> using e-mail, but the support is limited to replying and creating new threads.
> This is believed to be adequate for die-hard e-mail users, however.

Here I strongly suggest to not use discourse. It's very painful to use
and its interface is not intuitive. It has a mailing-list mode but it
still hard to use and not very handy.

Regards,

[0]: http://mlmmj.org

-- 
David