Remember that there is heavy organizational inertia and culture on the LKML. Moving to Gitlab is practically akin to gutting that and beginning a fresh project with forked code — the kind of cultural makeover that most companies don’t survive, and won’t do unless they’re forced to. And maintaining starting culture is even more crucial for volunteer-driven projects than for corporate projects with very different incentives.
The problem is cultural, as well as organizational. Firstly, I doubt any of the current maintainers would be willing to do that, especially without Linus's blessing and secondly, without a fully managed Gitlab* instance that takes care of sync and whatever else automatically (provided by the Foundation), this would be an unreasonable burden on the maintainers.
FWIW that's already happening with the BPF subsystem https://github.com/libbpf/libbpf
Who gets into software as a profession, and then lets a bad UI turn them away from a project? When so much of the valuable skillset in programming is understanding and navigating a possibility space where the UI isn't built yet? (And I'm sure some kernel contributors would argue it's more _unusual_ than actively _worse_).
I know this paints me as old and out of touch. I know this. But I think it still applies. When I look at my interns, the good developers tend not to be the ones tripped up by onboarding to systems and workflows that aren't exactly like the trendy development tools or what they saw in school.
Software doesn't have to be so difficult and tedious to use, as has been demonstrated by a decade of u/x in the UI space. Nowadays, nobody would ever consider gordian knot for their video editing, and I don't blame them.
This idea that one must suffer to learn is as outmoded as alchemy. You don't need to take the good with the bad; learn from the bad and make more of it good. I lived though the old times, and they sucked!
Nowadays, if the developer doesn't give any thought to u/x, people won't give any thought to his creation, and rightly so. The days of cryptic incantations and tedious rituals are largely over.
This type of assertion is made in a lot of contexts, but I don't believe it holds true. I believe that there are a subset of people who are willing to learn a new skill. Of those people, there are very few who are willing to learn a new skill but won't because of some perceived barrier to learning it. The vast majority of that subset will learn the new skill despite the perceived barrier.
Of the people who aren't in the set of people who are willing to learn a new skill, there will be very few people who will be movitated to learn the new skill because the perceived barrier to learning it has changed in some way.
Sure, you can argue that learning to drive a standard isn't that hard, and if you want to do a valuable public service like delivering mail, then learning to drive one is a small price to pay. But it's a barrier to entry for most young drivers because automatic transmissions are far, far more common. Besides, not only is the constant starting/stopping like a mail truck does usually hardest part of driving a manual, but isn't even fundamentally coupled to the act of delivering mail.
There's plenty of competent drivers who might be willing to deliver mail using an automatic (or developers to maintain the kernel on a platform with a decent UX), and that kind of process overhead isn't something that should just be waved away.
Edit: Changed accidentally repeated phrasing in middle paragraph
The Post example doesn't work in Europe or Africa post.
Is there an established open source project out there that originally used a mailing list or some other review software like gerrit, reviewboard, or phabricator, that transitioned to Github or Gitlab and actually increased the number of contributors and maintainers?
Plus I suspect the crowd capable of contributing meaningfully is quite comfortable with low level old school tech.
What? Aren't new collaborators way more likely to be younger and acquainted with Web-based tools like GitHub/GitLab?