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Comment by kanox | Hacker News Reader

Using plain-text email for sending patches is fundamentally broken because it's just not a reliable transmission medium. SMTP is very old and very moldy and it's not something that you want to force your contributors should deal with.

The first step is to always push you candidate commits to another inside a public git repo first. Unlike email the protocols underneath git push (ssh or https) are easy to use and operate reliably in all circumstances.

> Email has worked for the Linux dev community for decades and that should be protected and not disrupted.

No, it's wrong to protect workflows simply because they "old". There are many web-based code review solution out there and most of them are preferable to email.

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OLD == BAD

No, wrong. SMTP works fine and has done so for a long time, and it's incredibly easy to set up. It's the least of your problems when the rest of your task is patching the freaking Linux kernel.

And as far as reliabilty is concerned, SMTP is one of the most reliable protocols on the internet. Compare with this:

https://www.githubstatus.com/

SMTP is terrible, especially for people with corporate accounts behind firewalls. I've contributed to linux in the past and dealing with corporate IT was a miserable experience and saw lots of other kernel developers waste their time fiddling with SMTP parameters.

Those same firewalls can pass https or git+ssh just fine, it "just works". SMTP is not worth dealing with.

Email is also not very good as a forum, for example you can't edit your posts for spelling fixes, archives are unreliable and hard to browse and it's difficult to map git commits to reviews.

It's also wrong to claim that linux code review is somehow "distributed", it is very much centralized on a couple of mailing lists servers on vger.org.

It would be much better if kernel maintainers kept their trees on github and started accepting PRs.

It's not problem of SMTP or email in general that Outlook is trash. I get it, ages ago you bought into Microsoft's ecosystem, but can't you acknowledge it's flaws? If the server you're using doesn't let you send emails the way you want to, it's the problem of the server, not the email ecosystem in general.

Problems with corporate SMTP are widespread and configuring your own gets you easily marked as spam. The email ecosystem is very old and not very good and it's better to avoid relying on it entirely.

Fuck plain-text email.

OLD == BAD

SMTP is not just OLD, it is genuinely BAD

So far your only justification for this has been that your employer has a shitty firewall.

Your corporate firewall being run by morons has nothing to do with what's a good or bad protocol. A lot of people have the SSH port blocked, and git:// too. By your argument we shouldn't be doing literally anything on any port other than 443.

>Email is also not very good as a forum, for example you can't edit your posts for spelling fixes

So what? You learn to get it right. There are other advantages to emails that forums don't have, like...

>archives are unreliable

This utter bollocks. Archives are plenty reliable and everyone on the list has their own copy of everything. Many mailing lists are mirrored mulitple times. You simply cannot do this on GitHub.

>it's difficult to map git commits to reviews

Fair that this could be improved, but it's not exactly difficult. You can just search your mail archives for the subject line, or even just google it. Still, it could be improved.

>It's also wrong to claim that linux code review is somehow "distributed", it is very much centralized on a couple of mailing lists servers on vger.org.

Hundreds of mailing lists, not all of which are on vger.org, and some of the development doesn't take place on mailing lists at all. Some of it takes place on GitHub!

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