I feel like this is a sort of evidence that even for the most serious of engineers email lists are not an ideal way to communicate.
The fact that RMS missed an email and nobody else did anything about it either is a sign of an absolutely dysfunctional relationship between the project and its leadership.
LLVM could have been integrated under the GNU/FSF umbrella as a separate project of course.
[1] since the egcs debacle was resolved, RMS has had very little control of GCC
Chat has a way of getting completely lost. All your knowledge that goes into chat either goes into somebody’s head or it just disappears into the ether. This includes Slack, Discord, Teams, etc. Useful as a secondary channel but serious projects need something more permanent.
Bug tracking systems just don’t support the kind of conversations you want to have about things. They’re focused on bugs and features. Searchability is excellent, but there are a lot of conversations which just end up not happening at all. Things like questions.
That brings us back to mailing lists. IMO… the way you fix it is by having redundancies on both sides of the list. People sending messages to the mailing list should send followup messages. You should also have multiple people reading the list, so if one person misses a message, maybe another gets it.
Mailing lists are not perfect, just better than the alternatives, for serious projects.
(I also think forums are good.)
it does include threads, and no need for admins
Their biggest problem is that nobody uses them, though.
And since then... nothing. No more improvements. Development seems to have more or less halted since the Salesforce acquisition.
I used irc for a couple of decades before Slack, so was happy with purely linear chat (yeah, I'm also one of those weirdos who likes rebasing in git). Threads make everything more horrible, but at this point it feels like I just have to put up with it.
I like both rebasing and threads. More generally, I hate hate hate the 20+ individual messages on a single topic in a channel. It's just so annoying, threads are great for stuff like that, and give you one target for a reminder/update on whatever the issue is.
And yet, every time I change companies I realise again how much most people just don't threads on Slack.
alternatives:
discord has inline quoting and threads. treads are a bit more visible.
zulip creates a new thread for every message because it prompts you to set a topic, and then you browse the messages by topic.
To be fair, this is hyperbolic. To clarify, small groups within most orgs tend not to use threads in their internal channels AND congratulate everyone on their birthdays. The combination of this irritates me due to repeated notification spam.
One of the reasons I enjoy HackerNews is dang's enlightened and sensible moderation policy.
The static pages are there for browsing. They load fast, and I like the entire thread being on one page. No clickety-clicking and forgetting where you are in a forest of postings.
they are both messages in threads. what's different is the presentation.
some of the forums i use support both seamlessly, and i can choose which interface i prefer.
of course for the issue we are discussing, presentation is what matters. but, for most forums i do not believe they would have made it any easier to not miss a message. just look at hackernews. it is actually quite difficult to track which messages i have not read yet, (even if there is a marker on what's new) and it is therefore very easy to miss some.
that is not the case with email. because my mail client tracks the rad/unread status for each message. the problem with RMS has nothing to do with the form of a mailing list but with his particular async style of accessing the internet.
They can be treated like mailing lists, but are easy to navigate , easy to search and index, and easy to categorize.
[1] https://www.freelists.org/
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35839#:~:text=C...
With phone calls? Not that I suggest using calls as a way to manage your project, but at least you typically know that the recepient is there and listening before you transmit.
Serious question, since in my experience even specifically assigning someone a Jira tix doesn't guarantee they'll actually look at it and act.
You can't infer anything from this episode about the suitability or unsuitability of email for any particular purpose.
This caught my eye as well.
I'm not sure what his objection to accessing email in a normal-ish way might be. Any ideas?
My best guess is that it's something surveillance-related, but really not sure.
> I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly.
(he describes his arrangements in detail here: https://www.stallman.org/stallman-computing.html)
20 years ago someone missed an important email.
Every 20 seconds someone misses an important message in a thread hidden deep in a chat.
I don't understand how we have moved from email and IRC to the various chats. The latter seem to actively hide communication, as some deliberate sabotage.
I know that in the old days IRC chats were sometimes “made public” in the sense that a bot would scrape the entire chat and put it on the web. If that's what you're after, there's no technical reason I can think of you can't also do that with Discord except that it's not as trivial to implement because it's not just text and not just a single linear chatroom.
The discussion here is about archivability and searchability and I'm really not sure an IRC log fits that bill any more than a hypothetical Discord log.
I don't have a tonne of experience with all the chat offerings, just lots with one of the big ones, but to me the main flaw the new ones seem to have is that they have these "threads". Maybe I'm old and senile ("skill issue"), but if you reply to a message of mine into a thread, there's a 99% chance I'll never see it.
Maybe this is a UI issue, not a skill issue.
I have asked other people how they manage to follow updates in threads in order to see updates, and the answer seems to be that they don't. They just accept that many messages are just never seen by anybody. So it's not just me.
IRC doesn't have this. Starting a new channel, while extremely low effort, is not as integrated in the message flow. So people don't, the way they spawn threads left and right in new chats.
A second reason, in my experience (which may be atypical), is that IRC is seen as obviously not a replacement for a design or an email. But because new chats have more of an illusion of being authoritative rather than ephemeral, more people go "oh the rationale for that is in the discord/slack somewhere", whereas nobody with shame would ever say that about IRC.
> archivability and searchability and I'm really not sure an IRC log fits that bill any more than a hypothetical Discord log.
Yes, the Discord log is much better. But that's one of my points. It's better, so people choose it over something more suitable. So it's not "worse is better", but "better makes worse".
How do you do it in IRC?
The only way you can guarantee that you see all messages is if you read all messages. You can do that on Discord (it keeps track of read/unread messages) or on IRC. Obviously this is unreasonable if the Discord server/IRC channel is high-traffic. I really don't see how the two are any different in this regard.
I do take your point about the rest. You're saying that the differing capabilities cause people to use it differently and that is a point I hadn't considered. If IRC doesn't offer threads or pinned messages then you have to put documents outside of it and that might make it easier to find/index etc.
The question was how to see that threads are getting messages, and following them. IRC doesn't have threads, so doesn't have this problem.
On a higher level, how do I follow different conversations happening on IRC at the same time? I wouldn't say it's ever been a problem, in the decades that I've used IRC.
Hell, I use some IRC bridges that just flatten all the threads into one timeline, and that works much better too. Yes, in theory someone could just reply "yes" 10h after the previous message on a thread, and you have no way of knowing "yes to what"? But in practice that basically never happens.
Now, if the sender of that message had been on IRC, they would have instead said "yes I'll come to the dinner". Which would have been REALLY helpful on Chat too, because people may get popup notifications (phone or desktop) that just say "yes", and now they have to find (much harder than it should be) and open the thread to even know what the question/topic was.
And yes, people will probably also adjust their timelines a bit. Like if there's a major outage, maybe in modern Chat people start a thread to discuss a weekend trip (though do they? I'd expect them to start a completely separate group chat), whereas on IRC maybe they would go "you know what, this discussion can wait until after the outage". But people do that with modern Chat too. It's not just that the Chat is busy, the people are busy too, so you wait.
Still, there's no problem having a couple of conversations.
If you feel like I'm not answering your question it's probably because you seem to be saying "how do you solve this problem in IRC?", and I honestly don't understand what the problem is.
I have a WAY harder problem keeping up with newer chat. Right now on my work social chat my full desktop monitor has enough vertical space to show a whole 5 messages. My IRC on the side on a smaller monitor is showing 28 messages at once.
Now, because the Chat is Google Chat, those 5 are all I'll ever see, because if I try scrolling up, the page starts dynamically populating messages, causing a bunch of scrolling, flipping pages up and/or down losing my place, so I just give up and chase the ephemeral "Jump to bottom" button before it decides to disappear.
I'm pretty sure Google Chat is the worst of all options in terms of UX, so I'm not saying Slack is as bad.
> You can do that on Discord (it keeps track of read/unread messages)
In my experience the number of threads people create will greatly exceed the ability of even a "supertasker" to keep click-click-clicking to follow. Basically if this isn't the thread you have open, you're not on it.
> Obviously this is unreasonable if the Discord server/IRC channel is high-traffic.
If an IRC channel is too high traffic, it tends to topic split into another channel. And IRC clients can certainly keep track of what you last saw.
> pinned messages
Channel topic serves that purpose, I think. Or maybe not for the way you use pinned messages?
I think the only functionality I'm missing in IRC is the ability to attach images and receive them inline if needed. Gotta have the memes. And some clients (e.g. irccloud) do support that.