Comment by knighthack

10 months ago

As someone who has never used mailing lists before (for software development), how much harder/less advantageous it is to migrate to an issues or thread-based approach, like with Github?

And why not?

The short version is:

- Distributing patches via email is more scalable than web hosting. Even GitHub could not host the level of activity happening on the LKML mailing list

- Web hosting has a variety of access and legal problems when working with international teams; email crosses borders more easily

- Email is a decentralized and distributed system that prevents any single company from controlling a project's development infrastructure (release infrastructure is another story, but multiple companies will generally manage their own release process anyway)