Re: Some Hurd related thoughts from someone who has no right to talk

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Hi Joshua,

> We need to show people how to use mailing lists.  I'm actually wanting
> to make a youtube video explaining this...Mailings lists are still super
> hard.  They are not intuitive...

What do you find unintuitive about them?  Do you mean the patch workflow
via email or general discussion via mailing list?

> I've started using Gnus, because John
> Wigley (current Emacs maintainer) recommended it.  But it is really easy
> to subscribe to a mailing list and have your inbox get flooded.  I
> personally can no longer use my hotmail account, because I subscribed to
> emacs-devel, bug hurd, bug guix, and guix devel.  My inbox was
> completely flooded with emails, I was unable to unsubscribe to guix
> devel, and It's really hard to filter email from a mailing list out of
> your inbox.
>
> I'm currently able to use multiple mailing lists because I subscribe to
> them via the email "+" trick.  I think I'm subscribed to bug-hurd with
> jbranso+bug-hurd@gnu.org.  And I have a rule that filters email sent to
> that email address to a separate bug hurd folder.

I’m subscribed to many mailing lists and I filter on the “List-Id”
header.  (You will also find a link to unsubscribe in the
“List-Unsubscribe” header.)  I found it more cumbersome to use email
address tags like “+bug-hurd”.

Gnus is a complex piece of software and I have to admit that despite
living in Emacs I have not been able to make it work for me.  I use
mu4e, which makes searching and filtering of emails very easy.  In fact,
on the server side I only have a rule to file all mailing list emails to
a separate IMAP folder.  I access the mails of individual mailing lists
by filtering with mu4e.

My filter rule for Emacs devel, for example, looks simply like this:

    list:emacs-devel.gnu.org

I bound that mu4e search to a bookmark so I don’t need to type it.  For
Guile things its

    (list:guile-user.gnu.org OR list:guile-devel.gnu.org OR
    list:bug-guile.gnu.org)

and so on.

I’ll gladly share more information about this set up off list.

> We need to have GNU/Hurd hangouts, just like the Emacs hangouts.
> I had one such hangout, but only one person showed up.  I'm not
> sure what free software solution we should have to do Hurd
> hangouts.  Maybe Google Chat is still the best solution...

What do you mean by “GNU/Hurd hangouts”?

> We need an easy way to have people assign code to GNU.  If you live in
> the U.S. you can actually use an electronic signature!  We could have
> software that would automate the copyright assigning process.

I think the problem here is not due to a lack of automation software,
but due to the fact that this is a legal process and changes thus have
to be coordinated with lawyers to make sure the assignment is still
considered valid.

--
Ricardo