Michael Haggerty <mhagger@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On 08/04/2016 05:58 PM, Johannes Schindelin wrote: > > [...] > > Even requiring every contributor to register with GitHub would be too much > > of a limitation, I would wager. > > [...] > * Discussion of pull requests can be done either > * via the website (super easy for beginners but powerful for > experienced users), > * by setting up email notifications for your account and replying to > those emails, or > * via an API. > Such discussion is all in markdown, which supports light formatting, > hyperlinks, and @-mentions. <snip> > Disclaimer: I work for GitHub, but in this email I'm speaking for myself. > > Michael > > [1] I concede that people who refuse on ideological grounds to use > proprietary software will find this step insurmountable. Perhaps we > could come up with a workaround for such people. I'm one of those ideological people and I don't see an acceptable workaround. GitHub already has misfeatures designed to lock people in into centralized messaging: * pull request feature doesn't work for self-hosted repos (this disincentivizes people from running and improving git-daemon/git-http-backend/etc...) * "noreply" email addresses * @-mentions you wrote about * custom email notifications This is a problem with Gitlab, Redmine, etc, too: they cannot interoperate with each other. At least for now, large proprietary mail providers like Gmail still interoperate with whatever Free Software SMTP software I run. I dread the day when that is no longer true. Some of these problems I hope public-inbox (or something like it) can fix and turn the tide towards email, again. In contrast, public-inbox is designed to push decentralization: * "reply" links are instructions for "git send-email" which encourage reply-to-all (this applies to what Jeff said about vger going down, I noticed it, too) * anybody can clone the code + repo, replicate the instances, and tweak it to their needs. * public-inbox.org/git/$MESSAGE_ID/t.atom allows subscriptions to Atom feeds without any registration or user-tracking * Message-IDs are exposed for proper threading and interop * low-bandwidth, Tor-friendly design to encourage deployments even behind NATs and firewalls. Anyways, my optimistic side might interpret your advocacy as GitHub already feeling threatened by public-inbox. I certainly wouldn't expect it at this stage, but I certainly hope it will be the case one day :) Disclaimer: I've always been willing to risk a lifetime of unemployment for ideology. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html