Re: Kernel development collaboration platform wish list

["Theodore Y. Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>]

One of the things I'd like to add as a strong desire is the ability to
review patches via web if that's what users would like to do.  There
are some real benefits for web-based review.  It means that if you
need to see greater context, it's relatively easy to do this.  It also
is convenient to be able to see the conversation for a particular hunk
of code right alongside the code.

It's clear that whatever we do, it needs to be compatible with e-mail.
That's very clear.  But it would be useful if we can support both the
e-mail and web-based review.  There have some prototypes that have
been floated which shows that it is at least possible; perhaps
imperfectly, but something which provides a bidrectional gateway
between those who perfer to use e-mail and those that prefer to use a
web-based UI would be able to do it.

There will be many potential kernel contributors who will be used to
web-based UI's such as those that are available on github.  So while
remaining e-mail compatible, having some way of allow as many
operations to be done via web interfaces might help us get some newer
developers who are more comfortable to living on the web than some of
us more senior developers who remember when "gopher" was a text-based
search engine, and not a mascot for the Go programming langauge.  :-)

       	       	       	 	- Ted