On Wed, 12 Apr 2023 at 20:41, Arvids Godjuks <arvids.godj...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Here's a question: Who is going to be in charge of maintaining the GitHub > org and administrating it? > As someone who does community management for a long long time, I forsee > someone needing that to be their life for a project of this scale. Probably > multiple people. Paid for their work, I might add. > I don't know, there are already 40+ members in the group, i don't know who has what permissions though. > While we can't really say for sure how it would turn out, drawing on my > experience with online communities of all sorts and seeing what others had > to deal with on Github, things can get our of control fast. > GitHub is also not a suitable space to have RFC discussions and all that - > it's just not the right medium for that. Feedback - yes, gaging a wider > community for some feedback - sure. And maybe some of the PHP's mailing > lists can be moved to Github, since there are many. > > But internal development lists need to stay where they are. These lists > are not meant for the general public to drive by and throw in a question or > two. The noise-to-signal ratio already at times is too high on this list, > now imagine 10-20-30x the activity that Github will bring. It will become > unmanageable. You are also required to police your org. > You also ignore the biggest thing: Github is owned by Microsoft, and > Microsoft is an American company. It abides by US laws, politics and so on. > That has consequences and puts PHP project under the same umbrella, which > the mailing list is not under. Github (Microsoft) can't decide to ban > someone or ask for someone to be removed as a core developer from the > mailing list. On Github - they can. > > Well there are plenty of mailing list that could be trailed on. PHP-DOCS for example, could be moved to a discussion board on the php-docs repository. https://github.com/php/doc-en RFCs dont have a repository to belong too. > If people want to mirror internals to GitHub and manage it all and then > feed back the information into the list with links and feedback - > personally be my guest. But let's get one thing clear - email has been and > is the most critical communication tool out there and that is not going to > change. All those Slacks, Discords, Githubs, Microsoft Teams (why MS sucks > at making any type of messaging platform so badly?) in the end do not > replace email at all. Your email client cannot go offline just because > Amazon US-WEST-1 has died again (yes, it dying is basically a meme now). Or > because your provider had a major outage, so now you can't open Github. Or > someone misconfigured a BGP route and took down half the internet with it. > You can't have a copy of github on your phone, laptop, desktop or any other > device stored locally on each one of them giving you resiliency not to lose > all that data. What if github gets hacked and someone goes and nukes a > bunch of data? Or some DMCA takedown gets claimed against the org and > Github is required to comply by law? It does not matter that it might have > been bogus or frivolous - unless you have the funds to hire a lawyer and > defend yourself in court from which jurisdiction the DMCA came, you are > stuffed as a Thanksgiving turkey. > The internet is still the internet and all those issues can still effect email. I use gmail and if googles email servers go down email the mail server that send the email doesnt have retry setup I wont get that email. If my internet goes down I wont get the emails untill its back up. If the server PHP used for the maillist server goes down nothing get sent/received. The internet and everything connected to it can and will go down. Email isn't magically unaffected by that fact.
