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Date: Wed, 12 Apr 2023 15:57:46 +0200
Message-ID: <CADyq6s+oOdOVsbon=FLKHioWrfJTz24R7hHYXX0gCAH007jTMg@mail.gmail.com>
To: autaut03@gmail.com
Cc: PHP Developers Mailing List <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Moving PHP internals to GitHub
From: ocramius@gmail.com (Marco Pivetta)

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FYI: https://externals.io/message/87501#87501

Also: wow, that was 7 years ago?! :O

Marco Pivetta

https://mastodon.social/@ocramius

https://ocramius.github.io/


On Wed, 12 Apr 2023 at 15:53, Alex Wells <autaut03@gmail.com> 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.
>  - no way of editing a message. Mistakes will always be made, so being able
> to quickly fix them would be nice
>  - 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
>  - 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.
>
> 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 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?
>

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