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Date: Sat, 28 Mar 2020 20:24:30 +0000
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Subject: The perennial question of e-mail volume and off-list collaboration
From: rowan.collins@gmail.com (Rowan Tommins)

Hi Dan,

I'm picking out the below into its own thread, to avoid derailing the 
particular RFC discussion where you mentioned it.


On 28/03/2020 14:28, Dan Ackroyd wrote:

> I don't think this email list is a great place to work through all of
> those details. Email is not a great medium for this type of discussion
> in general, and causes a lot of noise for people who are not taking
> part in that work.
>
> Some of the people who are interested in working on how to implement
> generics in PHP have been doing that in a github repo
> https://github.com/PHPGenerics/php-generics-rfc/issues
>
> If you have the energy to work on this, please consider opening a
> similar repo as a place for people to discuss ideas and work through
> all the details, as that would be far more likely to have a productive
> discussion and produce the best possible RFC*. oh, and obviously link
> to that repo here so people can join that conversation.

While I agree that the mailing list is an imperfect collaboration tool, 
I am not at all convinced that threads you are *not* taking part in 
constitute "noise" (as opposed to off-topic messages in threads you 
*are* taking part in). If you're using a mail client that doesn't 
support any kind of threading, switch to one that does, and simply 
ignore threads you're not interested in.

I'm equally unconvinced (as noted previously) that github is a good 
replacement technology here - its support for threading and keeping 
track of what you've read is worse than most mail clients. The ability 
to propose changes to an agreed text as pull requests is an interesting 
one, but I notice that's not currently being used in that example.

More importantly, though, I think fragmenting discussions into lots of 
separate forums is bad for the project as a whole. At worst, it leads to 
small groups making a series of decisions, and then using the RFC 
process only to defend those proposals, rather than iterate them, as 
discussed here: https://externals.io/message/109076#109153 The repo you 
link to there is a case in point - I can't find any message to the list 
which invited anyone to "join that conversation".

My opinion is that this list - or its successor - should *always* be 
used to co-ordinate discussions, with regular summaries of what's been 
discussed off-list being posted or linked to here so that one 
subscription is enough to get an idea of what's going on. If an e-mail 
list is really not fit for that purpose, we should look at what would be 
- a web-based forum with good threading and notification support would 
seem the obvious alternative.

Regards,

-- 
Rowan Tommins (né Collins)
[IMSoP]