Re: Migrating to sourcehut - what's missing?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com>
> Date: Wed, 22 Dec 2021 08:07:22 -0800
> Cc: eric@ericabrahamsen.net, philipk@posteo.net, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> We have not yet decided to migrate the mailing list there, but we
> have also not decided to never do that, ever.

No, sorry: migrating the Emacs mailing lists from mailman is not on
the table.  You are probably not aware of the infrastructure that we
enjoy with mailman-driven lists.gnu.org and its support by GNU
volunteers.  Ask yourself how come there's absolutely no spam on our
lists (except what we ourselves post there ;-), ever.  That's not a
miracle, but hard work by several people, day in and day out.  There
are large and important projects, including GNU projects, that don't
use lists.gnu.org, and their mailing lists are worse, in both
cleanliness and features like search, possibility to download past
messages, etc.

So we are not moving our lists from lists.gnu.org any time soon.

> To lower the barrier, I'd focus on migrating the bug tracker, git,
> etc. first and leave the mailing list(s) for later.  Once we have
> migrated the important bits, we can consider the proposal to also move
> the mailing list in more detail.  Of course, some will fear that
> migrating the mailing list will then never happen, but on the other hand
> we shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

It's not just to lower the barrier: moving the bug tracker was the
single most important reason why we are doing this.  Please leave all
the other jobs alone.  The perfect is the worst enemy of the good.

> I'm personally not too happy with the features of lists.sr.ht right now,
> but it's neither worse nor better than Mailman (in my use).

Oh no, it's much worse.  Maybe not for you, but I'm the genie in the
bottle behind the management of the Emacs lists, and I'm telling you:
what we have on lists.gnu.org is much better, and doing the same
elsewhere will require a lot of work and volunteers to get to the same
level.  We didn't get there overnight, either: try looking at the
archives of bug-gnu-emacs 10 or 15 years ago, and you will see the
catastrophe we needed to deal with back then.

> So I suggest we do what Eli says and leave this to one side for the
> moment.

Yes, please!