Comment by bayindirh
10 months ago
I personally don't think GitHub's PR model is superior to e-mail based patch management for two reasons. First, e-mail needs no additional middleware at git level to process (I can get my mails and directly start working on my machine), plus e-mail is at least one of Git's native patch management mechanisms.
This is not about spam, server management or GitLab/Gitea/whatever issue. This is catering to most diverse work methods, and removing bottlenecks and failure points from the pipeline. GitLab is down, everybody is blocked. Your mail provider is failing? It'll be up in 5 minutes tops, or your disk is full probably, go handle it yourself.
So Occam's razor outlaws all the complex explanations for mail based patch management. The answer is concise in my head:
> Mailing list is a great archive, it's infinitely simpler and way more robust than a single server, and keeps things neatly decentralized, and as designed.
This is a wind we can't control, I for one, am not looking and kernel devs and say "What a bunch of laggard luddites. They still use e-mail for patch management". On the contrary, I applaud them for making this run for this many years, this smoothly. Also, is it something different what I'm used to? Great! I'll learn something new. It's always good to learn something new.
Because, at the end of the day, all complex systems evolve from much simpler ones, over time. The opposite is impossible.
> Your mail provider is failing? It'll be up in 5 minutes tops, or your disk is full probably, go handle it yourself.
Well until you deal with email deliverability issues, which are staggeringly widespread and random. Email were great to send quick patches between friends like you'd exchange a USB key for a group project. For a project the size of Linux? It doesn't scale at all. There is a reason why Google, Meta, Red Hat, and [insert any tech company here] doesn't collaborate by sending patches via email.
Just wanted to back up this comment with a tiny bit of possible evidence: https://lwn.net/Articles/950567/
the problem with mail-based patch management is that it doesn't scale well, management wise... when you have hundreds of patches and multiple reviewers who can review them, Github/Gitlab environments make it easier to prioritize the patches, assign who will do the review, filter the patches based on tags, and keep track of what wasn't reviewed yet...,
mail-based patch management is fine for smaller projects, but Linux kernel is too big by now.. it sure is amazing how they seem to make it work despite their scale, but it's kinda obvious by now, that some patches can go unnoticed, unprioritized, unassigned, ...
and open source is all about getting as many developers as possible to contribute to the development. if I contribute something and wait months to get it reviewed, it will deter me from contributing anything more, and I don't care what's the reason behind it. the same goes for if I contribute something and receive an argument between two or more reviewers whether it's the right direction or not and there's no argumentative answer from a supervisor of the project and this situation goes on for months...
> and open source is all about getting as many developers as possible to contribute to the development
[citation needed]
It's what "open source" enables, but it may not necessarily be a desired goal of a FLOSS project.
Email is just the protocol. What you're really saying is that http-based protocols make more powerful tools possible.
It's not really enough to state your case. You have to do the work.
On the surface, the kernel developers are productive enough. Feel free to do shadow work for a maintainer and keep your patch stack in Gitlab. It it can be shown the be more effective, lots of maintainers are going to be interested. It's not like they all work the same way!
They just have a least common denominator which is store-and-forward patch transport in standard git email format.
> GitLab is down, everybody is blocked
Everyone still has at least the base branch they're working on and their working branch on their machine, that's the beauty of working with Git. Even if someone decides to pull a ragequit and perma-wipe the server, when all the developers push their branches, the work is restored. And issues can be backed up.
> Also, is it something different what I'm used to? Great! I'll learn something new.
The thing is, it's harder and more difficult in a time that better solutions exist. Routinely, kernel developers complain about being overworked and onboarding of new developers to be lacking... one part of the cause certainly is that the Linux kernel is a massive piece of technology, and another one that the social conventions of the Linux kernel are very difficult, but the tooling is also very important - Ballmer had a point with "developers developers developers".
People work with highly modern tools in their day jobs, and then they see the state of Linux kernel tooling, and they say "WTF I'm not putting up with that if I'm not getting paid for it".
Or to use a better comparison... everyone is driving on the highway in the same speed, but one car decides to slow down, so everyone else overtakes it. The perpetual difficulties of many open source projects to accomodate changing times and trends - partially because a lot of small FOSS is written by people for their individual usage! - are IMHO one of the reasons why there is so much chaos in the FOSS world and many private users rather go for the commercial option.