Re: thoughts on a Merge Request based development workflow

[Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>]

On Mon, 07 Oct 2019 17:33:29 +0200 (CEST)
David Miller <davem@davemloft.net> wrote:

> From: "Drew DeVault" <sir@cmpwn.com>
> Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2019 14:37:28 -0400
> 
> > Until this part. Phasing out email in favor of a centralized
> > solution like Gitlab would be a stark regression.  
> 
> I have to make a statement about this because it's really the elephant
> in the room.
> 
> Email is on the slow and steady decline to an almost certain death.

And so has IRC. I would hope that email doesn't face the same fate.
What replaced IRC? Slack! The most useless interface for having
anything more that watercooler conversations.

Whatever "replaces" email, please keep those stupid emojis and
especially the animated ones out of it. It does nothing but distract
from the conversation.

I blame Outlook as the death of email. It's probably the most used
email client but also the most useless one. It doesn't support proper
tree threading, and it's impossible to follow a long thread with it.
Not to mention, it can't do inlined conversations to save itself.

> 
> And I say this as someone who is maintaining email lists for more than
> 25 years, and has to sift through several hundred emails every day.
> 
> Somewhere down the road, in the not too distant future, email will
> simply not be an option.  You can "use" it, but I can guarantee it
> will not be in a state where you will want to.
> 
> So we can stay in denial about this, or we can do something proactive
> to prepare ourselve for this inevitable result.
> 
> And when we have these conversations about how important it is to
> retain email based workflows, is that really to make sure we have a
> backup plan in case new infrastructure fails, or is it to appease
> "senior" maintainers like myself and others who simply don't want to
> change and move on?
> 
> Personally, I seriously want to change and move on from email, it's
> terrible.
> 
> I just want tools and pretty web pages, in fact I'll use just about
> anything in order to move on from email based workflows entirely.

I want tools that work, and are versatile. If you have a replacement
that's not a "one size fits all", where you can build any client
against it (like we have with email), then I will be very happy. But
forcing everyone to a single workflow is going to be a huge step
backwards.

-- Steve