Comment by ratorx
10 months ago
I don’t think there is enough demonstrable benefit to sacrifice the ubiquity and flexibility of email for a newer solution, especially for existing maintainers who are probably very comfortable with the current workflow.
Harder to understand and contribute is a bad, but unless there is a proposal for a similarly flexible system that has minimal downsides and massive advantages, the preference of existing maintainers should dominate over potential future contributors. Especially factoring in how expensive of a migration it would be.
I can understand this mindset, but I also think this is how communities die. They go to great lengths to avoid inconveniencing existing members while neglecting to welcome new ones. In the short term, the better choice is always to favor the existing contributors right up until they start dropping out and there's no one left to replace them.
Linux is so ubiquitous & important that might never happen, maybe it will just become increasingly captured by corporate contributors who can at least build long lasting repos of knowledge and networks of apprenticeship to help onboard newbies. Open source in name only.
I really like the way sourcehut integrates mailing list patches with a good UI. I’d like to see that become more common in some of these “classic” open source projects.