Re: [FFmpeg-devel] [RFC] 5 year plan & Inovation

[Andrew Sayers <ffmpeg-devel@pileofstuff.org>]

On Tue, Apr 30, 2024 at 09:05:05PM +0200, Ondřej Fiala wrote:
> On Mon Apr 29, 2024 at 9:04 PM CEST, Davy Durham wrote:
> > Presently do you not have to create an account on the devel mailing list to
> > contribute to ffmpeg?
> >
> > So on the flip side, I (actually) find it just as annoying to have to
> > create such accounts at every project rather than my having one account at
> > GitHub (or a relatively few for other hosting sites) and can then
> > contribute to literally thousands of projects without any friction.
> I would disagree on the "friction" part. To contribute, you have to "fork"
> the project, add your "fork" as a new git remote, push to it, and only then
> can you create a pull request. In comparison, contributing using email is
> literally just two simple git commands without ever having to leave the
> terminal.

IMHO, GitHub have improved that user experience significantly in recent years.
Yes you're still making a fork and pushing it, but the experience is more like
click the edit button -> make changes (in an admittedly clunky web editor) ->
save and push.  The rest is just kinda presented as implementation details.

That's a bit of a nitpick, but the wider point is interesting -
GitHub etc. are fast-moving targets, so today's friction points become
tomorrow's selling points, then the next day's lock-in opportunities.
That makes it hard to compare to a mailing list, which is unlikely to be
better or worse ten years from now.

> > Moreover now being subscribed to that list I get 50 emails a day that I
> > have to wait through. Just so long as I want to contribute. Sure I can
> > create rules but it is pretty obnoxious.
> >
> > As a casual contributor, I much prefer getting notifications about my
> > occasion contributions.  But one can opt to get notified of everything by
> > subscribing to the whole project.
> I actually agree that the mailing list can be somewhat annoying as well,
> which is why I like that on SourceHut you can send a patch to their mailing
> lists without being subscribed and it's standard practice that people Cc you
> on the replies. I really feel like this should be standard practice;
> subscribing to the mailing list makes no sense if you only want to send in a
> single patch, and it increases the effort required by flooding you with emails
> which aren't relevant to you, as you say.
> 
> I personally find the mailing list much less annoying than using GitHub even
> when subscription is required, but I feel like without having to subscribe
> it's the most straight-forward way really.

I haven't properly tried this, and it's an ugly hack if it works at all, but it
might be possible to support logged-out comments with a web-based trigger.

Triggers are designed to let you e.g. ping a URL on github.com when some
third-party dependency is updated, and have code on their servers automatically
pull in that dependency and rebuild your package without manual intervention.
But you could equally ping "my-web-hook?name=...&comment=..." then have your
bot turn that into a comment.

This isn't unique to GitHub - a quick look suggests GitLab can do the same,
and I wouldn't be surprised if SourceHut can too.  And a self-hosted solution
could presumably use this as the basis for a general anonymous comment thing.
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