llvm dev - Jun 2021 - [cfe-dev] Mailing List Status Update

I've just tried out discourse for the first time. It is not clear to me how
to use it to replace mailing lists. It has a setting "mailing list
mode",
which sounds like the right thing -- sending all messages via email. Except
that option is global -- all messages in all categories on the llvm
discourse instance. Which definitely isn't what I want at all. I don't
want
to subscribe to MLIR, for example.

In general, I'd say I'm pretty uncomfortable with switching from a
mailing
list to discourse. Discourse seems entirely reasonable to use for
end-user-facing forums, but I'm rather unconvinced about its suitability as
a dev-list replacement. Other communities (e.g. python) seem to have a
split, still: mailing lists for dev-lists, and discourse for
end-user-facing forums.

I'd also note that Mailman3 provides a lot more features than what we're
used to with mailman2, including the ability to interact/post through the
website.

Maybe someone can convince me that I'm just being a curmudgeon, but at this
point, I'd say we ought to be investigating options to have Someone Else
manage the mailman service, and keep using mailing lists, rather than
attempting to switch to discourse.


On Tue, Jun 1, 2021 at 4:50 PM Tom Stellard via cfe-dev <
cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> We recently[1] ran into some issues with the mailing lists that caused
> us to disable automatic approval of subscriptions.  Over the past few
> months, the LLVM Foundation Board of Directors have been investigating
> solutions to this issue and are recommending that the project move its
> discussion forum from mailman to Discourse[2].
>
> The proposed migration plan is to move the discussion lists (e.g *-dev,
> *-users lists) to Discourse as soon as possible.  The commit email lists
> (*-commits lists) will remain on mailman until a not-yet-determined date
> in the future, after which they will be replaced by something else.
> Some commit lists alternatives include Discourse and GitHub commit
> comments (but there may be others).
>
> Here are the reasons why the LLVM Foundation Board of Directors is
> recommending this change:
>
> - The LLVM project discussion lists cannot be adequately maintained by our
>    current volunteer infrastructure staff and without changes we run the
>    risk of a major outage.
>
> - We are able to make this change without significant impact to user's
or
>    developer's daily workflows because Discourse supports email
> subscriptions
>    and posting (NOTE: if you are concerned that your workflow may be
> impacted
>    by this change, please contact the Infrastructure Working Group[3], so
>    they can help test your workflow with Discourse.)
>
> - Discourse gives us additional features that will benefit the community:
>    - Easy to signup and subscribe to categories
>    - Better moderation tools.
>    - Web-based user interface.
>    - Ability to send announcements to multiple categories to avoid having
> to
>      cross-post community wide announcements.
>
> - A subset of the community (MLIR) have been experimenting with Discourse
>    for over a year and are able to provide feedback about this experience
>    to the Board of Directors.
>
> We did also consider one alternative, which was migrating our lists to a
> mailman hosting service.  However, we concluded that with all the work it
> would take to migrate our lists to another service, it would be better
> if we moved to a service (like Discourse) that provided more features
> than what we have now.
>
> We understand that moving to Discourse is a change for the community and
> that people may be worried about this having a negative impact on their
> participation in the project.  As mentioned above, we believe that this
> change can be done without significant impact to anyone’s workflows.
> If you disagree, please contact the Infrastructure Working Group, to
> document the impact to your workflow, so we can work together to find
> a solution for your issue.
>
> If you have any other questions or comments you can raise them on this
> thread and please keep criticisms constructive and on topic.
>
>
> LLVM Foundation Board of Directors
>
> [1] https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2021-March/149027.html
> [2] https://www.discourse.org/
> [3] https://github.com/llvm/llvm-iwg
>
> _______________________________________________
> cfe-dev mailing list
> cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org
> https://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cfe-dev
>
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On Thu, Jun 3, 2021 at 3:20 PM James Y Knight via llvm-dev <
llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> I've just tried out discourse for the first time. It is not clear to me
> how to use it to replace mailing lists. It has a setting "mailing list
> mode", which sounds like the right thing -- sending all messages via
email.
> Except that option is global -- all messages in all categories on the llvm
> discourse instance. Which definitely isn't what I want at all. I
don't want
> to subscribe to MLIR, for example.
>
I don't use the "mailing list mode" personally, but it has a
little note
under it that "Muted topics and categories are not included in these
emails". I think you could mute everything you aren't interested in
(e.g.
MLIR) and still get emails for the things you are.

-- River

>
> In general, I'd say I'm pretty uncomfortable with switching from a
mailing
> list to discourse. Discourse seems entirely reasonable to use for
> end-user-facing forums, but I'm rather unconvinced about its
suitability as
> a dev-list replacement. Other communities (e.g. python) seem to have a
> split, still: mailing lists for dev-lists, and discourse for
> end-user-facing forums.
>
> I'd also note that Mailman3 provides a lot more features than what
we're
> used to with mailman2, including the ability to interact/post through the
> website.
>
> Maybe someone can convince me that I'm just being a curmudgeon, but at
> this point, I'd say we ought to be investigating options to have
Someone
> Else manage the mailman service, and keep using mailing lists, rather than
> attempting to switch to discourse.
>
>
> On Tue, Jun 1, 2021 at 4:50 PM Tom Stellard via cfe-dev <
> cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> We recently[1] ran into some issues with the mailing lists that caused
>> us to disable automatic approval of subscriptions.  Over the past few
>> months, the LLVM Foundation Board of Directors have been investigating
>> solutions to this issue and are recommending that the project move its
>> discussion forum from mailman to Discourse[2].
>>
>> The proposed migration plan is to move the discussion lists (e.g *-dev,
>> *-users lists) to Discourse as soon as possible.  The commit email
lists
>> (*-commits lists) will remain on mailman until a not-yet-determined
date
>> in the future, after which they will be replaced by something else.
>> Some commit lists alternatives include Discourse and GitHub commit
>> comments (but there may be others).
>>
>> Here are the reasons why the LLVM Foundation Board of Directors is
>> recommending this change:
>>
>> - The LLVM project discussion lists cannot be adequately maintained by
our
>>    current volunteer infrastructure staff and without changes we run
the
>>    risk of a major outage.
>>
>> - We are able to make this change without significant impact to
user's or
>>    developer's daily workflows because Discourse supports email
>> subscriptions
>>    and posting (NOTE: if you are concerned that your workflow may be
>> impacted
>>    by this change, please contact the Infrastructure Working Group[3],
so
>>    they can help test your workflow with Discourse.)
>>
>> - Discourse gives us additional features that will benefit the
community:
>>    - Easy to signup and subscribe to categories
>>    - Better moderation tools.
>>    - Web-based user interface.
>>    - Ability to send announcements to multiple categories to avoid
having
>> to
>>      cross-post community wide announcements.
>>
>> - A subset of the community (MLIR) have been experimenting with
Discourse
>>    for over a year and are able to provide feedback about this
experience
>>    to the Board of Directors.
>>
>> We did also consider one alternative, which was migrating our lists to
a
>> mailman hosting service.  However, we concluded that with all the work
it
>> would take to migrate our lists to another service, it would be better
>> if we moved to a service (like Discourse) that provided more features
>> than what we have now.
>>
>> We understand that moving to Discourse is a change for the community
and
>> that people may be worried about this having a negative impact on their
>> participation in the project.  As mentioned above, we believe that this
>> change can be done without significant impact to anyone’s workflows.
>> If you disagree, please contact the Infrastructure Working Group, to
>> document the impact to your workflow, so we can work together to find
>> a solution for your issue.
>>
>> If you have any other questions or comments you can raise them on this
>> thread and please keep criticisms constructive and on topic.
>>
>>
>> LLVM Foundation Board of Directors
>>
>> [1] https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2021-March/149027.html
>> [2] https://www.discourse.org/
>> [3] https://github.com/llvm/llvm-iwg
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> cfe-dev mailing list
>> cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org
>> https://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cfe-dev
>>
> _______________________________________________
> LLVM Developers mailing list
> llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org
> https://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/llvm-dev
>
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On Thu, Jun 3, 2021 at 6:20 PM James Y Knight via llvm-dev
<llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>
> I've just tried out discourse for the first time. It is not clear to me
how to use it to replace mailing lists. It has a setting "mailing list
mode", which sounds like the right thing -- sending all messages via email.
Except that option is global -- all messages in all categories on the llvm
discourse instance. Which definitely isn't what I want at all. I don't
want to subscribe to MLIR, for example.
>
> In general, I'd say I'm pretty uncomfortable with switching from a
mailing list to discourse. Discourse seems entirely reasonable to use for
end-user-facing forums, but I'm rather unconvinced about its suitability as
a dev-list replacement. Other communities (e.g. python) seem to have a split,
still: mailing lists for dev-lists, and discourse for end-user-facing forums.
>
> I'd also note that Mailman3 provides a lot more features than what
we're used to with mailman2, including the ability to interact/post through
the website.
>
> Maybe someone can convince me that I'm just being a curmudgeon, but at
this point, I'd say we ought to be investigating options to have Someone
Else manage the mailman service, and keep using mailing lists, rather than
attempting to switch to discourse.
+1 to this. I've tried discourse in the past and not found it to be a
palatable replacement for mailing lists. Some of that is certainly
inertia (I've been using mailing lists for a *long time*) that I could
work to overcome, but my preference is to continue with mailing lists.

~Aaron
>
>
> On Tue, Jun 1, 2021 at 4:50 PM Tom Stellard via cfe-dev <cfe-dev at
lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> We recently[1] ran into some issues with the mailing lists that caused
>> us to disable automatic approval of subscriptions.  Over the past few
>> months, the LLVM Foundation Board of Directors have been investigating
>> solutions to this issue and are recommending that the project move its
>> discussion forum from mailman to Discourse[2].
>>
>> The proposed migration plan is to move the discussion lists (e.g *-dev,
>> *-users lists) to Discourse as soon as possible.  The commit email
lists
>> (*-commits lists) will remain on mailman until a not-yet-determined
date
>> in the future, after which they will be replaced by something else.
>> Some commit lists alternatives include Discourse and GitHub commit
>> comments (but there may be others).
>>
>> Here are the reasons why the LLVM Foundation Board of Directors is
>> recommending this change:
>>
>> - The LLVM project discussion lists cannot be adequately maintained by
our
>>    current volunteer infrastructure staff and without changes we run
the
>>    risk of a major outage.
>>
>> - We are able to make this change without significant impact to
user's or
>>    developer's daily workflows because Discourse supports email
subscriptions
>>    and posting (NOTE: if you are concerned that your workflow may be
impacted
>>    by this change, please contact the Infrastructure Working Group[3],
so
>>    they can help test your workflow with Discourse.)
>>
>> - Discourse gives us additional features that will benefit the
community:
>>    - Easy to signup and subscribe to categories
>>    - Better moderation tools.
>>    - Web-based user interface.
>>    - Ability to send announcements to multiple categories to avoid
having to
>>      cross-post community wide announcements.
>>
>> - A subset of the community (MLIR) have been experimenting with
Discourse
>>    for over a year and are able to provide feedback about this
experience
>>    to the Board of Directors.
>>
>> We did also consider one alternative, which was migrating our lists to
a
>> mailman hosting service.  However, we concluded that with all the work
it
>> would take to migrate our lists to another service, it would be better
>> if we moved to a service (like Discourse) that provided more features
>> than what we have now.
>>
>> We understand that moving to Discourse is a change for the community
and
>> that people may be worried about this having a negative impact on their
>> participation in the project.  As mentioned above, we believe that this
>> change can be done without significant impact to anyone’s workflows.
>> If you disagree, please contact the Infrastructure Working Group, to
>> document the impact to your workflow, so we can work together to find
>> a solution for your issue.
>>
>> If you have any other questions or comments you can raise them on this
>> thread and please keep criticisms constructive and on topic.
>>
>>
>> LLVM Foundation Board of Directors
>>
>> [1] https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2021-March/149027.html
>> [2] https://www.discourse.org/
>> [3] https://github.com/llvm/llvm-iwg
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> cfe-dev mailing list
>> cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org
>> https://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cfe-dev
>
> _______________________________________________
> LLVM Developers mailing list
> llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org
> https://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/llvm-dev

On Thu, Jun 3, 2021 at 3:20 PM James Y Knight via llvm-dev <
llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> I've just tried out discourse for the first time. It is not clear to me
> how to use it to replace mailing lists. It has a setting "mailing list
> mode", which sounds like the right thing -- sending all messages via
email.
> Except that option is global -- all messages in all categories on the llvm
> discourse instance. Which definitely isn't what I want at all. I
don't want
> to subscribe to MLIR, for example.
>
> In general, I'd say I'm pretty uncomfortable with switching from a
mailing
> list to discourse. Discourse seems entirely reasonable to use for
> end-user-facing forums, but I'm rather unconvinced about its
suitability as
> a dev-list replacement.
>
Can you elaborate why or what aspect makes it unsuitable? We've been using
this exclusively without a  "dev list" for MLIR and it is working
perfectly
well as far as I can tell. I believe Swift does the same thing as well.

Thanks,

-- 
Mehdi


> Other communities (e.g. python) seem to have a split, still: mailing lists
> for dev-lists, and discourse for end-user-facing forums.
>
> I'd also note that Mailman3 provides a lot more features than what
we're
> used to with mailman2, including the ability to interact/post through the
> website.
>
> Maybe someone can convince me that I'm just being a curmudgeon, but at
> this point, I'd say we ought to be investigating options to have
Someone
> Else manage the mailman service, and keep using mailing lists, rather than
> attempting to switch to discourse.
>
>
> On Tue, Jun 1, 2021 at 4:50 PM Tom Stellard via cfe-dev <
> cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> We recently[1] ran into some issues with the mailing lists that caused
>> us to disable automatic approval of subscriptions.  Over the past few
>> months, the LLVM Foundation Board of Directors have been investigating
>> solutions to this issue and are recommending that the project move its
>> discussion forum from mailman to Discourse[2].
>>
>> The proposed migration plan is to move the discussion lists (e.g *-dev,
>> *-users lists) to Discourse as soon as possible.  The commit email
lists
>> (*-commits lists) will remain on mailman until a not-yet-determined
date
>> in the future, after which they will be replaced by something else.
>> Some commit lists alternatives include Discourse and GitHub commit
>> comments (but there may be others).
>>
>> Here are the reasons why the LLVM Foundation Board of Directors is
>> recommending this change:
>>
>> - The LLVM project discussion lists cannot be adequately maintained by
our
>>    current volunteer infrastructure staff and without changes we run
the
>>    risk of a major outage.
>>
>> - We are able to make this change without significant impact to
user's or
>>    developer's daily workflows because Discourse supports email
>> subscriptions
>>    and posting (NOTE: if you are concerned that your workflow may be
>> impacted
>>    by this change, please contact the Infrastructure Working Group[3],
so
>>    they can help test your workflow with Discourse.)
>>
>> - Discourse gives us additional features that will benefit the
community:
>>    - Easy to signup and subscribe to categories
>>    - Better moderation tools.
>>    - Web-based user interface.
>>    - Ability to send announcements to multiple categories to avoid
having
>> to
>>      cross-post community wide announcements.
>>
>> - A subset of the community (MLIR) have been experimenting with
Discourse
>>    for over a year and are able to provide feedback about this
experience
>>    to the Board of Directors.
>>
>> We did also consider one alternative, which was migrating our lists to
a
>> mailman hosting service.  However, we concluded that with all the work
it
>> would take to migrate our lists to another service, it would be better
>> if we moved to a service (like Discourse) that provided more features
>> than what we have now.
>>
>> We understand that moving to Discourse is a change for the community
and
>> that people may be worried about this having a negative impact on their
>> participation in the project.  As mentioned above, we believe that this
>> change can be done without significant impact to anyone’s workflows.
>> If you disagree, please contact the Infrastructure Working Group, to
>> document the impact to your workflow, so we can work together to find
>> a solution for your issue.
>>
>> If you have any other questions or comments you can raise them on this
>> thread and please keep criticisms constructive and on topic.
>>
>>
>> LLVM Foundation Board of Directors
>>
>> [1] https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2021-March/149027.html
>> [2] https://www.discourse.org/
>> [3] https://github.com/llvm/llvm-iwg
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> cfe-dev mailing list
>> cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org
>> https://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cfe-dev
>>
> _______________________________________________
> LLVM Developers mailing list
> llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org
> https://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/llvm-dev
>
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On Thu, Jun 3, 2021 at 6:19 PM James Y Knight <jyknight at google.com>
wrote:
> I've just tried out discourse for the first time. It is not clear to me
> how to use it to replace mailing lists. It has a setting "mailing list
> mode", which sounds like the right thing -- sending all messages via
email.
> Except that option is global -- all messages in all categories on the llvm
> discourse instance. Which definitely isn't what I want at all. I
don't want
> to subscribe to MLIR, for example.
>
FWIW, it would seem that one secret trick here is to NOT check "mailing
list mode" -- that option is mostly there to confuse you, I guess.

In general, I'd say I'm pretty uncomfortable with switching from a
mailing
> list to discourse. Discourse seems entirely reasonable to use for
> end-user-facing forums, but I'm rather unconvinced about its
suitability as
> a dev-list replacement. Other communities (e.g. python) seem to have a
> split, still: mailing lists for dev-lists, and discourse for
> end-user-facing forums.
>
> I'd also note that Mailman3 provides a lot more features than what
we're
> used to with mailman2, including the ability to interact/post through the
> website.
>
> Maybe someone can convince me that I'm just being a curmudgeon, but at
> this point, I'd say we ought to be investigating options to have
Someone
> Else manage the mailman service, and keep using mailing lists, rather than
> attempting to switch to discourse.
>
On that last point, I've gone ahead and asked the folks at osci.io
("Open
Source Community Infrastructure") if they'd be willing to host our
mailing
lists. They are a group at RedHat whose mission is to support
infrastructure for open-source community projects, and they host mailman3
lists for a number of other open-source groups, already (
https://www.osci.io/tenants/). So, I believe they have the necessary
experience and expertise.

They have said they indeed are willing and have the capacity to run this
for us as a service, if we'd like. We'd still need to be responsible for
things like list moderation, but they'd run the mailman installation on
their infrastructure. In my opinion, we ought to take this option, rather
than trying to push a migration to discourse.

To me, it seems this would be a much clearer upgrade path, and would solve
the hosting/volunteer-admin issue -- including for commit lists -- giving
the current maintainers quicker relief from the undesired task of running
the list service. Additionally, since it would be a migration to Mailman3,
we would get many of the additional features mentioned as desirable, e.g.
searchable archives and posting from the website.

On Tue, Jun 1, 2021 at 4:50 PM Tom Stellard via cfe-dev
<
> cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> We recently[1] ran into some issues with the mailing lists that caused
>> us to disable automatic approval of subscriptions.  Over the past few
>> months, the LLVM Foundation Board of Directors have been investigating
>> solutions to this issue and are recommending that the project move its
>> discussion forum from mailman to Discourse[2].
>>
>> The proposed migration plan is to move the discussion lists (e.g *-dev,
>> *-users lists) to Discourse as soon as possible.  The commit email
lists
>> (*-commits lists) will remain on mailman until a not-yet-determined
date
>> in the future, after which they will be replaced by something else.
>> Some commit lists alternatives include Discourse and GitHub commit
>> comments (but there may be others).
>>
>> Here are the reasons why the LLVM Foundation Board of Directors is
>> recommending this change:
>>
>> - The LLVM project discussion lists cannot be adequately maintained by
our
>>    current volunteer infrastructure staff and without changes we run
the
>>    risk of a major outage.
>>
>> - We are able to make this change without significant impact to
user's or
>>    developer's daily workflows because Discourse supports email
>> subscriptions
>>    and posting (NOTE: if you are concerned that your workflow may be
>> impacted
>>    by this change, please contact the Infrastructure Working Group[3],
so
>>    they can help test your workflow with Discourse.)
>>
>> - Discourse gives us additional features that will benefit the
community:
>>    - Easy to signup and subscribe to categories
>>    - Better moderation tools.
>>    - Web-based user interface.
>>    - Ability to send announcements to multiple categories to avoid
having
>> to
>>      cross-post community wide announcements.
>>
>> - A subset of the community (MLIR) have been experimenting with
Discourse
>>    for over a year and are able to provide feedback about this
experience
>>    to the Board of Directors.
>>
>> We did also consider one alternative, which was migrating our lists to
a
>> mailman hosting service.  However, we concluded that with all the work
it
>> would take to migrate our lists to another service, it would be better
>> if we moved to a service (like Discourse) that provided more features
>> than what we have now.
>>
>> We understand that moving to Discourse is a change for the community
and
>> that people may be worried about this having a negative impact on their
>> participation in the project.  As mentioned above, we believe that this
>> change can be done without significant impact to anyone’s workflows.
>> If you disagree, please contact the Infrastructure Working Group, to
>> document the impact to your workflow, so we can work together to find
>> a solution for your issue.
>>
>> If you have any other questions or comments you can raise them on this
>> thread and please keep criticisms constructive and on topic.
>>
>>
>> LLVM Foundation Board of Directors
>>
>> [1] https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2021-March/149027.html
>> [2] https://www.discourse.org/
>> [3] https://github.com/llvm/llvm-iwg
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> cfe-dev mailing list
>> cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org
>> https://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cfe-dev
>>
>
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On 3 Jun 2021, at 18:19, James Y Knight via llvm-dev
wrote:
> I've just tried out discourse for the first time. It is not clear to me
how
> to use it to replace mailing lists. It has a setting "mailing list
mode",
> which sounds like the right thing -- sending all messages via email. Except
> that option is global -- all messages in all categories on the llvm
> discourse instance. Which definitely isn't what I want at all. I
don't want
> to subscribe to MLIR, for example.
>
> In general, I'd say I'm pretty uncomfortable with switching from a
mailing
> list to discourse. Discourse seems entirely reasonable to use for
> end-user-facing forums, but I'm rather unconvinced about its
suitability as
> a dev-list replacement. Other communities (e.g. python) seem to have a
> split, still: mailing lists for dev-lists, and discourse for
> end-user-facing forums.
>
> I'd also note that Mailman3 provides a lot more features than what
we're
> used to with mailman2, including the ability to interact/post through the
> website.
>
> Maybe someone can convince me that I'm just being a curmudgeon, but at
this
> point, I'd say we ought to be investigating options to have Someone
Else
> manage the mailman service, and keep using mailing lists, rather than
> attempting to switch to discourse.
I think that mailing lists have proven repeatedly that they’re actually
very bad for the sort of technical conversations we want to have in the
community.  It’s possible to put a lot of work into your mailing-list
experience and end up with something that half-solves some of these
problems, but it takes a lot of time and expertise, and you’re left with
something that still suffers the inherent flaws of email.

Let me try to explain why, using the ongoing byte-type RFC as a focusing
example.


First off, this is an important conversation that ought to be of interest
to a large number of LLVM developers.  Monitoring a high-traffic mailing
list takes a lot of time; I would say that most LLVM developers don’t
proactively keep up with llvm-dev.  I only became aware of this
conversation because someone thought to explicitly CC me into it.  There
are almost certainly some people who ought to be engaged in this
thread who still aren’t aware of it.

A major part of why that’s the case is that mailing lists lack structure
beyond the Reference structure of threads.  There is no inherent
categorization or tagging in a mailing list; by default, readers see a
jumble of every single thread.  And people are often reluctant to split
mailing lists by topic, and when they do sometimes conversations get
unnaturally divided, or something that should be of broader interest
gets unnecessarily pigeon-holed.  So if I want to find things that are
interesting to me, I have to look at every single active thread to see
what’s going on.

Now, in some cases, I can have that done automatically for me.  I could,
for example, set up a filter that puts all the RFC threads in a
high-priority mailbox that I can scan more frequently.  But that has
two problems.  First, not every generally-important thread is marked
as an RFC; notably, this thread isn’t.  If I set up this filter, I’d
probably be a lot less likely to read the mail mailbox for the list,
and so I’d probably miss most of these threads.  And second, I can do
that for myself, but I can’t make other people do it.  There are people
who aren’t reading and contributing to important threads because they
aren’t aware of them.  The lack of structure creates a firehose effect
that undermines the ability of conversations to reach a broader
consensus, no matter what I do locally.

And honestly, I think that’s one of the biggest problems affecting LLVM
right now: we have no good consensus mechanism as a community to change
LLVM IR.  We have RFC threads, and then we have “make a presentation at
at an LLVM Developer’s Conference, probably the US one, and then convene
a roundtable to try to get people on board with your plan.”  As a result,
I think there’s a lot of reluctance to change IR when, honestly, IR
is supposed to be an evolving tool that needs to change in order to
solve problems better.  I’m not saying that the mailing list is the sole
cause of this problem, but I do think it contributes.


Secondly, what structure does exist for mailing lists is not good
for technical conversations.  The deep problem is the tree structure
of threads, which is mathematically pleasing but manifestly leads to
worse results.  Different forks of the thread end up repeating the
same arguments because people don’t see that that conversation has
already happened — or worse, different forks *don’t* repeat the same
arguments because the people involved in them aren’t aware of the rest
of the thread.  I’ve seen so many threads where different branches
continued on to reach completely different conclusions, or where
one contributor jumps from one branch to another, leaving the people
who were only engaged in the old branch thinking that the thread has
come to a resolution.  Again, it undermines the process of reaching
a consensus.

Now, again, some mail clients help to solve this problem.  Usually you
don’t want to abandon a threaded view entirely, but some clients support
a flat-threaded view where new posts simply appear sequentially.
But, again, you can’t count on other people reading the thread that
way, and that makes a big difference.  If you want to build a consensus,
you probably need to reply to everyone individually, in case they’re
not reading the rest of the thread.  And you can’t assume that people
reading your reply to one part of the thread will have read some post
in a different part.


Finally, there are a ton of minor technical/usability annoyances with
email that I think people too often neglect:

- Reference headers seem to get regularly messed up, and any
  sizable conversation inevitably ends up with not just multiple
  forks within a thread, but actually multiple threads that happen
  to share a subject line.

- Email is immutable, so problems like that can’t be retroactively
  fixed.  Along the same lines, people can’t go back to edit their
  posts to fix typos or technical errors, or to tone them down if
  they realize they got a little too heated.

- Long-running threads would often benefit from someone maintaining
  an index of important posts, but that’s not something you can do
  in email, because you can’t insert posts at the top of a thread
  or keep those posts current.

- You can’t split a thread in email without completely losing
  context.  For example, if you realize that the last five posts
  are really the start of a new conversation that ought to be in
  its own thread, you can’t just move those posts to a new thread,
  you actually have to start a new thread and copy-and-paste the
  old emails in and hope that nobody continues to reply in the old
  place.

- If you try to explicitly CC people into a thread, and you use
  the wrong email address, you’ll actually contaminate the thread
  with that wrong email address, so that everybody who replies to
  you will also send email to the wrong email address, and you
  can’t rely on anyone else you CC’ed having actually gotten the
  email.

Now, forums have their own usability annoyances, without question.
I’ve been using Discourse fairly heavily for about three years (over
at forums.swift.org), and I’ve got my share of complaints.  My
point is that those problems should not be treated as blockers
when we have equal or worse problems with mailing lists that we’ve
just come to accept.

John.
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