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Comment by ddevault | Hacker News Reader

>is exactly why projects like Cairo suffer from lack of contributions

I don't really agree with this. Many projects enjoy a vibrant development community on mailing lists today. Cairo suffers from different issues - and ultimately in Cairo's case it doesn't really matter. Cairo has been "done" for years, it's not the end of the world if it doesn't see much activity.

>Do people really want to deal with text patches in 2020?

Yes. You'll find many of them in this very thread. SourceHut is a brand-new service, only around for 2 years in alpha, and in 2020 alone it transacted 37,000 emails. There's obviously demand here.

One thing that can matter a lot if you're trying out the email workflow is making sure you're using a good client. I made one that I recommend as such: https://aerc-mail.org. Other good choices include mutt and alpine.

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Can you comment on individual lines of a changeset in an email and reply to such comments separately, and then see such conversations in the context of the diff? And then mark them as resolved when that happens?

Can you read those discussions later in a "flat" presentation without scrolling through emails one-by-one?

These are some of the killer features of the PR/MR Github/Gitlab workflows.

To clarify, I'm talking about steps 4-7 here: https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/github/colla...

As well as the "Resolving conversations" section.

>Can you comment on individual lines of a changeset in an email and reply to such comments separately, and then see such conversations in the context of the diff? And then mark them as resolved when that happens?

Yes, except for the last bit. Unlike GitHub/GitLab you can also respond to several comments at once.

>Can you read those discussions later in a "flat" presentation without scrolling through emails one-by-one?

I don't know what this means.

Judging from my GitHub experience, I think they mean seeing, under each chunk of code, the whole conversation thread pertaining to that chunk. In other words, where a standard mailing list format looks like:

    Person 1
        > Chunk of code 1
        Comment
        > Chunk of code 2
        Comment
    Person 2
        > Chunk of code 1
        Comment
        > Chunk of code 2
        Comment

they want a view like:

    Chunk of code 1
        Person 1
            Comment
        Person 2
            Comment
    Chunk of code 2
        Person 1
            Comment
        Person 2
            Comment

Yeah, we have a view like that.

Out of curiosity, do you have an example of what it looks like? (I checked several patches on https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-dev/patches but couldn't find anything with line-by-line discussion.)

Here's a simple example:

https://lists.sr.ht/~emersion/mrsh-dev/patches/3449

Thanks for the reply. It's more than I expected (even if the UI and the lack of interactivity inside the browser are still a problem for me).

Looking forward to experiencing it in practice someday. Maybe Emacs will finally migrate off Debbugs.

You should go ask them! There's an ongoing discussion about it on the mailing list right now.

I'm on the mailing list ;-)

The issue is brought up repeatedly, but there's no real movement right this moment (or for the last several months, really).

There are several proponents of SourceHut thanks to its email-based workflows and (apparently?) LibreJS compatibility. But none are passionate enough to push for it, thus far, and do the work required.

As opposed to, say, advocates of Gitlab (which got effectively banned by a long list of requirements, alas).

"and in 2020 alone it transacted 37,000 emails. There's obviously demand here."

Um, what?

Suppose you have 10 developers sending an average of 10 emails a day. That's 100 * 365, or 36 500 emails a year.

That stat doesn't sound very useful. 10 developers isn't demand.

Most projects on SourceHut don't receive anywhere near 10 patches per day. There are not any many large projects on sr.ht - established projects are slow to move off other platforms, and new projects haven't had a lot of time to gather steam. The top lists peak at like, 3 per day. What matters more is their volume: 1,447 of them were created in 2020.

>Cairo has been "done" for years, it's not the end of the world if it doesn't see much activity.

Cairo's fast antialiasing mode had a memory corruption bug that took 5 years after the bug report to be fixed. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/cairo/cairo/-/issues/44

Do you have a recommendation for a good GUI mail client?

Claws mail is pretty good IMO.

There are some more options here:

https://useplaintext.email

Thanks, last time I tested aerc I couldn't find a way to make it download all my mails locally. Is this possible?

No, but you can use it in combination with something like imapsync.

Try mbsync or OfflineIMAP. Both great tools to sync a remote mailbox to local.

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