Mailing Lists vs. GitHub (2018)
begriffs.com
begriffs.com
If, ten seconds after I've clicked Submit, I discover an embarrassing error in the code, or that I've accidentally committed some personal information, or I've sent the e-mail from the wrong address, or anything else I haven't thought of yet, there's nothing I can do and it's public forever.
Some would see this as an anti-feature, but I really do like using GitHub because I have the ability to go back and edit or delete my Pull Request if I spot an embarrassing mistake. I know the solution to this is "be more careful", but I still feel anxious sending e-mails to a mailing list, and calm using GitHub.
Does anyone relate?
> Finally, creating patches by hand with diff can take advantage of other options, like annotating the hunk headers with which C functions are affected (using the -p flag), and the choice of various algorithms such as “patience.”
One thing that wasn't mentioned as an advantage of a mailing list is the index a mail client provides for discussion. This allows one to easily see which messages have been read, who has responded to whom and the ability to jump to a particular message in the discussion.
Github, on the other hand, mixes the overall diff with comments, so if there are a lot of comments, and the diff is large, then it requires a lot of scrolling to find a given comment. It also takes some time to find a given comment and see if it someone has responded to it.