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Date: Sun, 02 Aug 2015 13:52:01 +0100
To: PHP Internals <internals@lists.php.net>
Message-ID: <0E784DFA-5BDD-42B6-9BCE-7746BDA4FCBE@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Move internals discussion to a better medium
From: rowan.collins@gmail.com (Rowan Collins)

On 2 August 2015 13:01:57 BST, Dor Tchizik <dor@tchizik.com> wrote:
>I propose that internals discussion to be moved (eventually entirely)
>to a
>different medium, where the example I have in mind is GitHub issues
>(but
>that is up for discussion).

While I think a different medium could be worth considering, I don't think squeezing open-ended discussions into an issue management system is a good idea. I don't think the archives would be any easier to use, and a lot of conversations don't need elaborate code references. Those that do can use Pull Requests etc on GitHub already, and we could think of ways of making those more visible without generating excessive noise on the main list.

There's always a temptation to put everything in one place, but it generally means compromises in the tools used. For instance, Wikipedia and MediaWiki use wiki pages for discussion, and Stack Overflow uses Q&A pages, but neither works as well as something actually designed for threaded discussion.

E-mail has the obvious advantage of being usable in many different ways by different people. With a decent threaded mail client (i.e. not GMail's web UI, whose "conversations" have no notion of sub-threads or marking some messages as read but not others), it's quite easy to pick out the subjects you're interested in, catch up after a while away, etc. There may be better archive interfaces out there, as I agree that those aren't great right now.

If you still think mailing lists aren't fit for purpose, though, why not look at something built for that actual purpose - phpBB, for instance?

As a final note, while encouraging new users is definitely a good thing, any project the size of PHP will always have a core set of developers who spend a lot of time working on and discussing it. If you make those people's lives difficult, no amount of shiny markdown is going to recover their lost effort, so any process change has to be carefully considered from that angle.

Regards,
-- 
Rowan Collins
[IMSoP]