Which Open Source development community still uses email mailing lists, and it bugs you?

Linux Discussion
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It’s 2020, and open source software-managed email mailing lists (think mailman) have been around since the 1990s.

I think it’s time for those tired old clunky, cumbersome-to-search mailing lists to be retired, and replaced with something more modern (probably something Slack-like, like say Mattermost, or maybe Discourse), yet is still Open Source. Or maybe Matrix? Or a self-hosted Gitlab instance? Pretty much anything like that would be an improvement, IMHO. I feel it’s important that it needs to be easily searchable, and easy to backup and upgrade, for whomever maintains it.

If you could wave your magic wand, and magically get some specific development community to quit with the mailing lists, and use something more modern (and more friendly to mobile), what would it be?

Personally, I wish Wireguard, and Debian would get more modernized here. Anyone else have any pain points here, which they’d wish to discuss?

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I have two I have wanted to contribute to for a while, but I can’t figure out how to do the mailing list submissions properly.

They are:

  1. The Linux Kernel
  2. U-boot
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Lua developers and Tcl community. There was a time I was interested in these two languages and mailing lists were the only places to find serious discussions about the subject. I just had a look and it seems not much has changed there.

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Maybe that’s the point, to keep discussions serious by keeping most people out :man_shrugging:

The last two I looked at were the Linux kernel and the RT kernel mailing lists. I never found the information I was looking for.

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It’s been my experience that trying to search through the archives of these mailing lists has always been a nightmare. Like I’ve given up trying. If a web search engine like Duck Duck Go can index these, then great. But any built-in search engine, to the mailing list archives? I don’t even bother trying.