[COFF] Re: [TUHS] Re: SunOS 4 in 2024

[ moved to coff ] On Thu, Mar 14, 2024 at 7:49 AM Theodore Ts'o <tytso(a)mit.edu> wrote: email based flows are horrible. Absolutely the worst. They are impossible to manage. You can't subscribe to them w/o insane email filtering rules, you can't discover patches or lost patches easily. There's no standard way to do something as simple as say 'never mind'. There's no easy way to follow much of the discussion or find it after the fact if your email was filtered off (ok, yea, there kinda is, if you know which archives to troll through). As someone who recently started contributing to QEMU I couldn't get over how primitive the email interaction was. You magically have to know who to CC on the patches. You have to look at the maintainers file, which is often stale and many of the people you CC never respond. If a patch is dropped, or overlooked it's up to me to nag people to please take a look. There's no good way for me to find stuff adjacent to my area (it can be done, but it takes a lot of work). So you like it because you're used to it. I'm firmly convinced that the email workflow works only because of the 30 years of toolings, work arounds, extra scripts, extra tools, cult knowledge, and any number of other "living with the poo, so best polish up" projects. It's horrible. It's like everybody has collective Stockholm syndrome. The peoople begging for a forge don't care what the forge is. Your philisophical objections to one are blinding you to things like self-hosted gitea, gitlab, gerrit which are light years ahead of this insane workflow. I'm no spring chicken (I sent you patches, IIRC, when you and bruce were having the great serial port bake off). I've done FreeBSD for the past 30 years and we have none of that nonsense. The tracking isn't as exacting as Linux, sure. I'll grant. the code review tools we've used over the years are good enough, but everybody that's used them has ideas to make them better. We even accept pull requests from github, but our source of truth is away from github. We've taken an all of the above approach and it makes the project more approachable.In addition, I can land reviewed and tested code in FreeBSD in under an hour (including the review and acceptance testing process). This makes it way more efficient for me to do things in FreeBSD than in QEMU where the turn around time is days, where I have to wait for the one true pusher to get around to my pull request, where I have to go through weeks long processes to get things done (and I've graduated to maintainer status). So the summary might be email is so 1970s, but the real problem with it is that it requires huge learning curve. But really, it's not something any sane person would design from scratch today, it has all these rules you have to cope with, many unwritten. You have to hope that the right people didn't screw up their email filters. You have to wait days or weeks for an answer, and the enthusiasm to contribute dies in that time. A quick turnaround time is essential for driving enthusiasm for new committers in the community. It's one of my failings in running FreeBSD's github experiment: it takes me too long to land things, even though we've gone from years to get an answer to days to weeks.... I studied the linux approach when FreeBSD was looking to improve it's git workflow. And none of the current developers think it's a good idea. In fact, I got huge amounts of grief, death threads, etc for even suggesting it. Everybody thought, to a person that as badly as our hodge-podge of bugzilla, phabricator and cruddy git push hooks, it was lightyears ahead of Linux's system and allowed us to move more quickly and produced results that were good enough. So, respectfully, I think Linux has succeed despite its tooling, not because of it. Other factors have made it successful. The heroics that are needed to make it work are possible only because there's a huge supply that can be wasted and inefficiently deployed and still meet the needs of the project. Warner