Pain points in Git's patch flow

[Konstantin Ryabitsev]

On Mon, Apr 19, 2021 at 09:49:46PM +0200, Sebastian Schuberth wrote:
> > To watch a particular filename, the "dfn:" prefix may be used.
> > The prefixes supported for a particular instance are documented in
> > <https://public-inbox.org/git/_/text/help/>, and you
> > can watch multiple files by combining with "OR".
> 
> Thanks for pointing out these interesting features, I wasn't aware of them.

Eric is being modest. There are very cool things brewing in public-inbox, like
ability to create saved searches and follow threads you're interested in.
E.g. you should be able to define something like "whenever someone mentions my
favourite file, function name, or term, copy the entire thread into my inbox
and continuously update it with new messages."

I'm hoping that this will help turn the concept of mailing lists on their head
-- instead of subscribing to a list, folks will instead subscribe to closely
relevant saved searches across any number of remote and local sources.

> > Email is already well-established with a good amount of small
> > players, and plain-text is relatively inexpensive.  So it seems
> > best to build off the only halfway-decentralized thing we have
> > in wide use, rather than trying to start from scratch.
> 
> While I can understand that conservative approach for a community
> around a tool as important as Git, I still fear that only ever
> sticking to technology that is already in wide use will hinder to look
> over the rim of the tea cup.

I view email as merely one way of exchanging RFC2822-formatted messages. 
There are others and RFC2822 is robust enough to serve as a good standard
base that allows both free-form and structured content, including mixed.

-K