Maybe I’m not understanding, but why is that wild? Is it just the fact that those people lost jobs? If it were a justification for a re-org I wouldn’t find it objectionable at all
Perhaps I'm being uncharitable but this line "each person will be more load-bearing" reads to me as "each person will be expected to do more work for the same pay".
It damages trust. Layoffs are nearly always bad for a company, but are terrible in a research environment. You want people who will geek out over math/code all day, and being afraid for your job (for reasons outside your control!) is very counterproductive.
It would have made them a laughing stock and the prospect of future cooperation would have been slammed shut. It would have made the USSR seem like sore losers. They were already public enemy number one thanks to the media PR machine. The Russians have been cooperating with the USA and ESA for many years on LEO missions, culminating in the successful ISS project.
It also speaks to an absolute failure of governance. If I missed an important email on a FreeBSD mailing list, you can bet that a dozen other people would see it and either poke me about it or just go ahead and act upon it themselves.
The fact that RMS missed an email and nobody else did anything about it either is a sign of an absolutely dysfunctional relationship between the project and its leadership.
If I had to guess, the actual GCC maintainers[1] had no interest into integrating a very large codebase into GCC which would duplicate a lot of its functionality.
LLVM could have been integrated under the GNU/FSF umbrella as a separate project of course.
[1] since the egcs debacle was resolved, RMS has had very little control of GCC
So, having been around a lot of different communication methods, I think email lists aren’t ideal, but for serious projects they’re better than all the alternatives.
Chat has a way of getting completely lost. All your knowledge that goes into chat either goes into somebody’s head or it just disappears into the ether. This includes Slack, Discord, Teams, etc. Useful as a secondary channel but serious projects need something more permanent.
Bug tracking systems just don’t support the kind of conversations you want to have about things. They’re focused on bugs and features. Searchability is excellent, but there are a lot of conversations which just end up not happening at all. Things like questions.
That brings us back to mailing lists. IMO… the way you fix it is by having redundancies on both sides of the list. People sending messages to the mailing list should send followup messages. You should also have multiple people reading the list, so if one person misses a message, maybe another gets it.
Mailing lists are not perfect, just better than the alternatives, for serious projects.
The static pages are there for browsing. They load fast, and I like the entire thread being on one page. No clickety-clicking and forgetting where you are in a forest of postings.
they are both messages in threads. what's different is the presentation.
some of the forums i use support both seamlessly, and i can choose which interface i prefer.
of course for the issue we are discussing, presentation is what matters. but, for most forums i do not believe they would have made it any easier to not miss a message. just look at hackernews. it is actually quite difficult to track which messages i have not read yet, (even if there is a marker on what's new) and it is therefore very easy to miss some.
that is not the case with email. because my mail client tracks the rad/unread status for each message. the problem with RMS has nothing to do with the form of a mailing list but with his particular async style of accessing the internet.
Piling on about chat. Slack threads are an abomination. They aren’t inline with the main channel so you can’t cut and paste an entire conversation with threads. And does exporting a channel include threads? Who knows because the admin wouldn’t do it for me.
Threads were introduced in, what, late 2016? The start of 2017? Some time around then, anyway. They were even more badly integrated at the start; there was no way to be notified about new messages in a thread, for example. By 2019 things were a little better, but - as you noticed - still not great.
And since then... nothing. No more improvements. Development seems to have more or less halted since the Salesforce acquisition.
I used irc for a couple of decades before Slack, so was happy with purely linear chat (yeah, I'm also one of those weirdos who likes rebasing in git). Threads make everything more horrible, but at this point it feels like I just have to put up with it.
> (yeah, I'm also one of those weirdos who likes rebasing in git).
I like both rebasing and threads. More generally, I hate hate hate the 20+ individual messages on a single topic in a channel. It's just so annoying, threads are great for stuff like that, and give you one target for a reminder/update on whatever the issue is.
And yet, every time I change companies I realise again how much most people just don't threads on Slack.
it's not the existence of threads that are the problem but their presentation. instead of hidden threads i'd prefer to be able to quote an message and have it shown inline. the fact that threads are so hidden is a major reason to avoid using them (for me at least)
alternatives:
discord has inline quoting and threads. treads are a bit more visible.
zulip creates a new thread for every message because it prompts you to set a topic, and then you browse the messages by topic.
Nobody uses them? You need better companies :-)) I've worked at a startup using Slack and a huge company using Slack plus I've seen a bunch of other companies. They were all using threads everywhere, they're incredibly useful, especially for big or active channels.
> Nobody uses them? You need better companies :-))
To be fair, this is hyperbolic. To clarify, small groups within most orgs tend not to use threads in their internal channels AND congratulate everyone on their birthdays. The combination of this irritates me due to repeated notification spam.
What are the current practical non-self-hosted options for an open source project mailing list? We (portaudio) are being (gently) pushed off our .edu-maintained mailing list server, google groups is the only viable option that I know about, and I know not everyone will be happy about that choice.
Freelists[1] is still around, LuaJIT hosts its mailing list there. So is Savannah[2]. Would also be interesting to know if it’s actually realistic to ask Sourceware[3] to give you a list or if those pages only reflect the state of affairs from two decades ago. (Only the last of these uses public-inbox, which I personally much prefer to Mailman.)
We use Mattermost and it’s working pretty well. The search is decent and it captures a lot more of the daily chitchat that isn’t long/serious enough for email and would otherwise be lost. The real benefit comes when you need to find some snippet that know was discussed 18 months ago and too much water’s passed under the bridge to remember exactly what was said.
Still, we are discussing it almost 30 years after it happened. What alternative messaging system offers such openness and stability? I don't see anything other than publicly archived mailing lists.
There is no communication method where this isn't possible. Email can be missed, chat can be missed, phone calls can be missed, even talking to someone in person can be missed. All forms of communication can fail such that the person sending the message thinks it was received when it wasn't. So one would need evidence that email is more likely to fail in this respect, rather than evidence it can happen at all, to show that email is a worse communication method.
> All forms of communication can fail such that the person sending the message thinks it was received when it wasn't.
With phone calls? Not that I suggest using calls as a way to manage your project, but at least you typically know that the recepient is there and listening before you transmit.
Sorry...maybe I'm dense. Email has worked for decades. If I don't catch something this relevant in an email forum, why would I automatically, without question, see it and understand its relevance in chat, Slack, etc.
Serious question, since in my experience even specifically assigning someone a Jira tix doesn't guarantee they'll actually look at it and act.
The fault here was entirely Stallman's own. He has some kind of byzantine but ideologically-pure protocol for reading his emails in batches, which he has to request explicitly from someone or something that retrieves them for him.
You can't infer anything from this episode about the suitability or unsuitability of email for any particular purpose.
I think OP might be confusing Stallman's website protocol with that for email:
> I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly.
Every 20 seconds someone misses an important message in a thread hidden deep in a chat.
I don't understand how we have moved from email and IRC to the various chats. The latter seem to actively hide communication, as some deliberate sabotage.
We have moved from IRC “to the various chats”? ... IRC is a chat. What makes IRC special or different in your view apart from being old?
I know that in the old days IRC chats were sometimes “made public” in the sense that a bot would scrape the entire chat and put it on the web. If that's what you're after, there's no technical reason I can think of you can't also do that with Discord except that it's not as trivial to implement because it's not just text and not just a single linear chatroom.
The discussion here is about archivability and searchability and I'm really not sure an IRC log fits that bill any more than a hypothetical Discord log.
> What makes IRC special or different in your view apart from being old?
I don't have a tonne of experience with all the chat offerings, just lots with one of the big ones, but to me the main flaw the new ones seem to have is that they have these "threads". Maybe I'm old and senile ("skill issue"), but if you reply to a message of mine into a thread, there's a 99% chance I'll never see it.
Maybe this is a UI issue, not a skill issue.
I have asked other people how they manage to follow updates in threads in order to see updates, and the answer seems to be that they don't. They just accept that many messages are just never seen by anybody. So it's not just me.
IRC doesn't have this. Starting a new channel, while extremely low effort, is not as integrated in the message flow. So people don't, the way they spawn threads left and right in new chats.
A second reason, in my experience (which may be atypical), is that IRC is seen as obviously not a replacement for a design or an email. But because new chats have more of an illusion of being authoritative rather than ephemeral, more people go "oh the rationale for that is in the discord/slack somewhere", whereas nobody with shame would ever say that about IRC.
> archivability and searchability and I'm really not sure an IRC log fits that bill any more than a hypothetical Discord log.
Yes, the Discord log is much better. But that's one of my points. It's better, so people choose it over something more suitable. So it's not "worse is better", but "better makes worse".
Look, even the most serious of engineers would be thrown off their game and miss an important email if someone offered to buy them a parrot. I assume that’s what happened.
It really feels quite divorced. Workers in those roles don’t always even know what the exploits will be used for, and the technical aspects are really interesting.
I briefly worked in offensive security at somewhere you may consider to fit the bill of “places like this” - people do it because it’s fun interesting and rewarding work. The pay is good too, but the fact that you just develop the exploits and don’t Push The Button(tm) really provides more mental space than you’d think.
I’ve never understood the attempt to draw a difference between threat and a vulnerability.
I’ve done offensive security work and worked on defensive security systems professionally. It seems to me like there’s a certain less technical side of computer security that cares a little too much about making definitions and checkboxes - when I get asked in an interview if I think threats or vulnerabilities are a bigger issue I know that job is not a good fit.
They are different things, so it makes sense to have two different terms to describe two different (but related) ideas. Your example interview question doesn't make much sense to me, though.
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