Question about this list

[Ben Gamari]

Excerpts from Amahdy's message of Wed Jan 27 13:47:52 -0500 2010:
> Many Open-Source communities use this kind of mailman mailing-lists
> I feel missing something here but really wondering why? even for new
> projects like Ubuntu (founded 2004 which is new to know other alternative
> technologies)
> 
> I love the Google-groups style, if you don't like Google there was always
> Yahoo, which both of them contains bunch of features and the ease of use ...
> Also some-how, forums are *ok* but with some preservations.
> 
> Back to this email's subject, about my question, actually they are 3:
> 
> 1- Google-group has a feature to an external-archive which could be a list,
> why not move on?

Because what we have works very well and doesn't rely on an external
entity. Mailing lists are the lifeblood of most open source projects.
Tying your mailing list service to an external provider makes little
sense in most cases. Requiring people to hand their personal information
over to Google just to participate in a project is unreasonable.

Furthermore, I have still yet to see a google groups-style interface
that handles threading even remotely sanely.  Without proper threading,
technical conversations quickly turn into an unintelligible mess. Try
following the LKML on Google Groups; it's simply unusable.

Lastly, when it comes to electronic communication email is the
lowest common denominator and can be easily processed with simple tools.
This is incredibly important when it comes to sorting and processing
large quantities of communications.

> 2- I find it always difficult to keep updated with this kind of lists, what
> type of software do you use? please share it with me, I find it very
> difficult to rely on a kind of RSS because I want to hit "reply" and "quote"
> the part of the message that I like, is there an advanced feature for that?

Just use your MUA. I use sup (although I'm slowly shifting to notmuch
and vim).  Both of these applications are very well suited to dealing
with truly massive mail volumes. Many people also use mutt which also
performs admirably. Some use Thunderbird and other graphical mail
clients, although in my opinion the graphical interface makes it very
difficult to process large quantities of mail efficiently.

There are a variety of options for mail filtering and sorting.  I
personally use procmail. It is simple and does its job quite well.

> 3- The OpenSource managers, why they prefer this kind of lists usually? it
> ends to be a very old fashion and not user friendly at all, or whatdya
> think?
> 
Answered above. I would argue that while our current tools may not be as
pretty as the more "modern" alternatives, they perform their designated
task far more effectively.

- Ben