Moving discussions to GitHub? (Philip Race)

[Chuck Davis]

I, for one, would be opposed to moving these discussions off the mailing
lists.  Most of the "issues" are straw men.

The mailing lists are a "push" technology so I don't have to do anything
special to get the info since my mail client is always on when my computer
is on.
I do not, and will not, place my code on a platform that is ruled by fiat
by an organization as fickle and error prone as Microsoft.  Hence, I seldom
access anything on GitHub and will not receive any of the discussions if
they move there and I have to do another sign-on to retrieve (and attempt
to find) the  information.  In my experience GitHub is not a user friendly
place and it IS NOT easy to find ANYTHING there.

I don't see any issue with formatting or searching in mailing lists.  Maybe
users need a better mail client or something.

Just my $.02.

On Fri, Aug 20, 2021 at 3:27 AM Sebastian Stenzel <
sebastian.stenzel at gmail.com> wrote:

> I am among the younger people here on the mailing lists (at least I think
> so) and I can very much relate to what Michael suggests. So here is my
> personal answer to the _why_ question:
>
> Mailing lists create an enormous barrier to external devs like myself who
> are willing to contribute:
> * Signing up to a means of the 80s feels just strange
> * Signing up to _any_ additional tool is deterring (same holds true for
> JBS), especially when you're used to low-threshold contributions to other
> projects can be
> * Therefore, signing up feels like a liability that you may not want to
> commit to, if you merely want to express your support for a single comment
> * It can be hard to find the correct mailing list for the topic you want
> to discuss
> * You'll
>    * either receive digests and miss a topic you're interested in
>    * or dozens of additional mails each day, alienating people who just
> want to follow specific discussions
> * No proper formatting
> * No proper linking to code, issues, PRs, ...
> * Hard to track diverging discussions
> * Very hard to search - I basically need to use Google and restrict the
> search to some mail archive
> * Linking to different topics means you need to either quote the whole
> thing or link to an archive
>
> On the other hand I see one important argument against GitHub Discussions:
> We have no control over how Discussions will change in the future. Even if
> they seem suitable today, we can't tell if it may be necessary to switch to
> yet another tool in 5 years. Each time you switch, you strip connections to
> discussions that took place on the previous platform. Switching tools
> always comes with a commitment to it and bears this risk.
>
>