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Date: Wed, 12 Apr 2023 17:56:11 +0200
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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: petk@php.net (Peter Kokot)

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?

I also prefer mailing lists in addition to 3rd party GitHub
environment. Professional and large open source projects all use such
mailing lists. These mailing lists include two decades of discussions
which is respectable to continue in such direction.