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Comment by cjbprime | Hacker News Reader

Neat! I used to be a kernel maintainer, and had a similar setup going inside emacs with gnus, and dvc-git commands bound to keys to apply patches. Here's an old blog post about some of it:

https://blog.printf.net/articles/2010/10/04/git-patches-in-g...

Gnus was too slow, but worse, emacs is single-threaded, so e.g. polling for new mail in the background blocked the rest of the editor while it happened. I never understood why it was impossible to have any kind of multithreading in emacs.

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Hey, would you mind writing up some details about your email setup for kernel work to sir@cmpwn.com? I'd like to understand more email-driven workflows, especially from kernel maintainers, to guide aerc's design.

Hm! I can't think of much to add, except.. the next thing I would've worked on might've been to integrate a client for https://patchwork.kernel.org/ to keep it in sync and mark patches there as handled.

Thanks! I wonder if you've seen my work with mailing lists on sourcehut, by the way?

https://sourcehut.org

I'm working on a replacement for patchwork. Here's an example of a thread which was rendered with my tool, which is just generated from organic mail threads without extra human intervention:

https://lists.sr.ht/~philmd/qemu/patches/5556

If you have more feedback or thoughts around this, I'd love to hear it too :)

A Patchwork client (well, a tool that does some of the more useful patchwork status updating, it's not a full client as such) for notmuch, which has a number of kernel dev users: https://github.com/stewart-ibm/pwnm-sync

> I never understood why it was impossible to have any kind of multithreading in emacs.

There are various ways to do multithreading in emacs now, but the answer to your question is usually “there’s a lot of existing elisp that isn’t thread-safe”, and that’s still kind of a problem.

I’m still a novice functional programmer so this may be a dumb comment but I thought a lisp would be more thread safe due to immutable data structures.

Not all fp languages are purely functional, and certainly not all lisps. In fact, the only lisp that I'm aware of that focuses on immutability is clojure. Granted, many lisp programmers may decide to keep their functions pure, but it's rarely enforced.

I "solved" this by having a separate emacs instance where I'd do mail and usenet.

So far, Gnus is still the best mail client in a terminal (that you can have the same instance in a tty and a X11 environment is just a bonus).

Aerc looks interesting but then there's the ugly truth that I do much less mail than I used to do 10 years ago. So I probably won't switch even if it's looking really sexy.

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