[llvm-dev] RFC: Moving toward Discord and Discourse for LLVM's discussions

[Stefan Teleman via llvm-dev]

On Mon, Nov 18, 2019 at 12:18 PM David Chisnall via llvm-dev
<llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>
> On 18/11/2019 17:04, Stefan Teleman via llvm-dev wrote:
> > In other words, the friction coefficient is directly proportional to
> > the verbosity of the mailing list.
>
>
> No, that is not what I said.  To get a one-off question answered on a
> mailing list, I have to:
>
> 0. Find the correct mailing list, which is not right next to the code.
> 1. Sign up.
> 2. Set up a filter for the mail that I don't care about.
> 3. Go and find the responses (hopefully my mail client does a good job
> of threading discussions - that varies a lot and most mobile ones are
> pretty bad)
> 4. Unsubscribe once my question is answered.

Hmmmm. Really?

So, every time you want to ask a question on llvm-dev or cfe-dev, you:

0. Find the appropriate mailing list.
1. Sign up for it.
2. Wait for the subscription confirmation email.
3. Set up a filter.
4. Search for existing answers to your question.
5. If [4] not found, ask your question.
6. Unsubscribe from the mailing list.

Really?

You are a pretty active contributor to llvm-dev and I find it
difficult to believe that, every single time you posted something to
llvm-dev, you went through this entire
subscribe-search-post-unsubscribe ritual described above.

I can tell you that I don't do that. I am subscribed to llvm-dev and
cfe-dev -- insofar as LLVM is concerned.

Yes, these mailing lists are verbose. Yes, at any given point in time,
a majority of the questions or answers posted on these lists aren't
directly related to my LLVM or clang interests of the moment. So,
those posts that aren't interesting to me, I delete them. The ones
that are interesting to me, I flag them with different labels in
GMail. Twice a year I do a bulk delete of all the emails from either
of these mailing lists based on a "before" filter.

Yes, it's work. It's work that I signed up for when I subscribed to
these mailing lists. I don't find it particularly onerous or
exhausting.

-- 
Stefan Teleman
stefan.teleman at gmail.com