[swift-evolution] Mailman?

[Rainer Brockerhoff]

On 12/15/15 09:50, swift-evolution-request at swift.org wrote:
> Date: Mon, 14 Dec 2015 21:44:49 -0800
> From: Chris Lattner <clattner at apple.com>
> To: Jacob Bandes-Storch <jtbandes at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [swift-evolution] Mailman?
> Message-ID: <B1869941-D495-4F41-9E4A-C71B6D9BB9A9 at apple.com>
> 
>>> On Dec 14, 2015, at 2:08 PM, Jacob Bandes-Storch via
>>> swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
>>> Another point that hasn't come up so far: inclusivity. I think
>>> making the discussion groups more easily accessible, and 
>>> indexable/searchable, would do a great deal towards this goal.
>>> We should strive to include people who don't live in their email 
>>> clients, and even people who want to contribute anonymously. 
>>> (Clearly, there are enough people who *do* want to use email
>>> that it's important to make sure any proposed solution has good 
>>> support for email notifications.)
> 
> I don’t understand this argument.  Email is a pervasive standard,
> mailman provides an index, and gmane provides an even better one.
> How would a web app be “more inclusive" than using something that has
> been standard for "a long time” and has tons of tools that work with
> it?

I'd like to point out that for a list like swift-evolution even the
digest traffic is relatively large; I see 3-5 digests every day.

While subscribing to the non-digest version would really be much more in
terms of messages, the fundamental positive aspect is that everything is
stored and readable off-line.

The (to me, huge) downside of the existing (and old) swift forums is
that you depend on constant connectivity and even have to check the
index page every day, or more, to make sure you don't miss some
important discussion. (I suppose that also applies to subscribing on
github, which I've never tried.)

The downside of Mailman seems to be the difficulty of threading when
responding to a digest (I'm now trying to include the MessageID in the
quote, maybe that works?) as well as the unwieldy mixture of top- and
bottom-quoting and endless requoting of the mailing list footer.

Regards,
-- 
Rainer Brockerhoff  <rainer at brockerhoff.net>
Belo Horizonte, Brazil
"In the affairs of others even fools are wise
In their own business even sages err."
http://brockerhoff.net/blog/