Hey Alex. On 12.04.23 15:52, Alex Wells wrote:
Hey.PHP currently uses internals@lists.php.net for communication. That includes mostly RFCs (or their votings, or their pre-discussion) and sometimes questions about the implementation or possible bugs. While emailing definitely works, it's not the best UX out there. Here are some immediate flaws which make the process harder than it should be: - having to subscribe to a mailing list to even see the discussions - supporting public archives such as externals.io to expose discussions to the public for those who aren't subscribed and keep historical data - having to learn the specific, uncommon rules of replying: bottom posting, word wrapping, removing footers. It's not to say any of those rules are complex or hard to follow; it's that they're basically inapplicable outside of emails, so they're usually not known by newcomers. Also popular emailing clients don't do any of that automatically, making each reply tedious.
Those rules are written down in https://github.com/php/php-src/blob/master/docs/mailinglist-rules.md and are in essence a modified version of one of the main rules of the internet https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1855
Yes: Most web-based mailinterfaces do not care about those basic rules of the internet - why that is is a separate discussion - but there are a lot of email-clients around that do care about those.
- no way of editing a message. Mistakes will always be made, so being able to quickly fix them would be nice
Email is no quickly written chat. You should read what you wrote, use your spell-checker and be 100% sure that that is what you want to express. That allows a much more clear and focused discussion as people will make sure they have expressed what they wanted with enough time. It also reduces the possibility of heated discussions (reduces! not eliminates! (-; )
- no formatting, especially code blocks. Sure, they are possible through HTML, but there's no single common way which all of the emailing clients will understand - like Markdown
What do you need formatting for? And most of us can read markdown in plaintext emails as well...
- no reactions - it's hard to tell whether something is supported or not. This includes both the initiative being discussed and the replies that follow. Sure, you can usually kind of judge the general narrative based on the replies, but it's not always clear what's in favor. There are usually many divergent branches of discussions and it's unknown what's supported the most.
It's a discussion. A :thumbs-up: is not helpful. And if you want to do that: Send an email with exactly that.
The discussion lives from meaningful interaction. Not a thumbsup/down echochamber
Based on those issues and PHP, I propose moving the discussions elsewhere - to some kind of modern platform. Since this is quite a big change in the processes used, I imagine an RFC would be needed. But before I do that I want to measure the reactions. If it goes well, I'll proceed with an RFC draft.
There have been a number of discussions over the years and all came to the conclusion that no other medium provided the means that the list wanted - at that time. Apart perhaps from NNTP (Did I mention that the mailinglists are available via NNTP? or at least should be. If not I might have to check the colobus integration...)
There are basically two choices here - a messenger-like platform (i.e. Slack, Teams) or a developer focused platform like GitHub. While messengers certainly work, they're more focused on working with teammates rather than actual discussions. They usually don't have a simple way to navigate publicly and are poor at separating multiple topics into threads. Some projects use them for that purpose, but it's usually a worse experience than what GitHub provides. GitHub is already used by PHP for both the source code and the issues, so that is a good candidate, especially since it's a platform designed to handle cases like this. Also, that should be a much easier transition now that the source and issues were moved to GitHub. Also, to be clear: I'm not proposing to remove all PHP mailing lists; some of them are one way (i.e. notifications for something) so they should definitely stay that way. Some of them might not even be used anymore. However, I want this change to affect all two-way (discussion) mailing lists if possible. Also, this does not include moving RFCs themselves to GitHub, only the discussion that happens via email. What are your thoughts?
I assume you already checked the mailinglist-archive and stumbled upon https://externals.io/message/87501#87643
I might have missed the new takes that weren't discussed there or that might have changed since that discussion.
At least apart from "there are a lot of new people around" and "the new people don't want to learn the rules"
Looking forward to your TL;DR
Cheers
Andreas
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