There are a lot of benefits in mailing list based development, but there are so many ways to do something wrong: send a patch to a wrong message/thread, forget cover letter or In-Reply-To header, attach instead of inline and so on.
Technically all the tools are available, but it takes a tangible amount of time and practice to configure them and start doing everything properly.
@abcdw I like the patch-over-mailing-list approach as a submitter. I do occasionally mess things up, but usually the reviewers will pardon me for sending a v2.
As for git send-email, I don’t like it much. The "mail user agent" function of git send-email is very unpleasant, because you can’t review what you did, it does not copy the email in your sent folder, you can’t apply filters. While claiming to be the only working MUA (the one you use daily being unworthy of that name).
@gugurumbe for editing capabilities it's possible to add --compose switch and/or combine git send-email with format-patches, but yes, overall you aright, it's not very friendly MUA experience.
@fosskers
> I've heard that plenty of people love applying mail-based patches, but the PR/MR system seems less open to user error, as you've mentioned.
That's right.
> So Codeberg or...?
IDK to be honest. I really like the offline friendlines of emails and it's a huge deal for me right now.
Overall, I'm good with sourcehut, but sometimes I have troubles with poorly formed patch series without cover letters or sent to a separate thread instead of reroll to the same one.
@fosskers I much prefer sending a patch than having to create a PR. The flexibility, which is what also brings the risk of making mistakes, is the crucial difference. Sending different patches in the same message or sending patches that depend on other patches are two examples of what the PR-workflow has difficulties expressing.
Also, if you make a mistake, no problem, just try again. People are willing to help (contract that to the silent no-message-no-response merge requests you sometimes see on GitHub, that feel so mechanic and impersonal).
@fosskers@pkal For a single patch it's ok (and for most newcommers attachment will be much easier I guess), but for patch series it's better to make inline patches and send each in a separate message, so you can spin off new subthreads for a particalur patch easily and also use existing tools like b4 to apply the latest reroll of the whole series.
So the piece of advice you gave is not incorrect, but additional information can be helpful here :)
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