Re: Any concrete plans after the GDB BoF?

[Joel Brobecker <brobecker@adacore.com>]

> > There are not a whole lot of hosting platforms out there, so my concern
> > is that, by making email integration a requirement, you're automatically
> > eliminating a number of solutions which could answer your requirements
> > just as well, only just differently, and from there, lose some great
> > features out there.
> 
> Please also take into consideration the other side of this: switching
> to a web-based discussions makes participation via email all but
> impractical.  People tend to answer short answers without quoting the
> context, assuming that all the context is visible in the web form
> anyway, and that makes email messages undecipherable.  I follow one
> such repository, which uses GitHub, for more than a year, and it is
> very frustrating.
> 
> So if good support for email is not a requirement, we need to consider
> the consequences of basically abandoning email entirely.

FTAOD, I am not saying that we must abandon email.

I understand what everyone is saying, and I understand the benefits
of email. But aren't we allowing our own experience to unfairly bias
the list of requirements?

Rather than say "email is nice because it provides those nice
properties" therefore "let's keep emails", I think we should say
"let's investigate any solution that preserve the nice properties",
including those that don't do via email. Otherwise, you're putting
the cart before the horses.

If we think that web-based is necessarily bad and hopeless, then
we're closing ourselves to some options where this might not be true.
All I'm saying is that we need to keep an open mind, rather than
corner ourselves by hanging on to one particular tool. You don't
need the tool, you need what the tool does for you.

If we allow ourselves to consider the idea that what's important
is the ease of having discussions, and that perhaps there might be
systems out there where discussions can be fluently had, read,
and reread later, or if we consider the idea that a certain amount
of sacrifice in this area in exchange for a significant-enough amount
of benefits is worth considering, then we open our mind to evaluating
more fairly a number of options which may surprise us, and be a net
gain for us and for the community.

-- 
Joel