llvm dev - Oct 2019 - An internet Forum instead of mailing lists?

Hi David,

That’s interesting, because I have a totally different experience. On a forum,
every topic gets its own thread, and replies are always there in order for
future reference. Topic categories can be defined which encourage subject
classification. Advanced searching helps to find already answered questions,
prevent duplicates, and enable the continuation of discussions even years later.
Mails however are always a mess in my mailboxes, because even if filtered, it’s
difficult to precisely follow conversation flows or find past topics. Also, the
way to keep conversation history is by quoting others, which tends to be
inconsistent and has a limit. Maintaining subjects for long is difficult and
finding content a pain. To me a proper forum is superior and useful than mailing
lists. Or at least based on my past experience.

John
> On 8 Oct 2019, at 17:53, David Greene <greened at obbligato.org>
wrote:
> 
> Joan Lluch via llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> writes:
> 
>> I suppose this has been asked before, but I wasn’t able to find a
>> discussion on the subject.
>> 
>> Is there a reason for not using a web based interface instead of a
>> mailing list?. It seems to me that a using a private Forum would bring
>> a lot of advantages.
> 
> I personally far prefer a mailing list.  It is easy to filter e-mails
> and doesn't require a web browser.  Every forum setup I've used
makes it
> much clunkier to respond to messages than with e-mail.
> 
>                        -David

On 08.10.19 21:49, Joan Lluch via llvm-dev wrote:
> Mails however are always a mess in my mailboxes, because even if filtered,
it’s difficult to precisely follow conversation flows or find past topics.
This seems to me mostly because the existing web interfaces to mailing 
list archives are inferior to e-mail clients.

I wonder if mailing list archives could (or perhaps already do) expose 
an API that would allow importing past history into an e-mail 
client-like viewer, or perhaps into an actual e-mail client.

It's not like those technologies are fundamentally incompatible...

> Also, the way to keep conversation history is by quoting others, which
tends to be inconsistent and has a limit.
Forums do that, too... and where they don't, I tend to find the history 
_harder_ to follow because it is less clear what somebody is responding to.

Cheers,
Nicolai
-- 
Lerne, wie die Welt wirklich ist,
Aber vergiss niemals, wie sie sein sollte.

On Tue, Oct 8, 2019 at 2:13 PM Nicolai Hähnle via llvm-dev <
llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>
>
> I wonder if mailing list archives could (or perhaps already do) expose
> an API that would allow importing past history into an e-mail
> client-like viewer, or perhaps into an actual e-mail client.
>
I know that GNU mailing lists allow downloading MBOX files for their list
archives in the web UI, and some searching around makes it seem like this
is a feature that can be toggled.  It also looks like you can wget/curl the
MBOX files directly[1] if you're a subscriber, but I don't know how the
LLVM list admin(s) feel about that.

[1]:
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2012-October/074210.html
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