LWN: Comments on "Digging into the community's lore with lei"

Digging into the community's lore with lei

tlw — 2021-12-24T13:39:31+00:00

we already had that, it was called g+

Digging into the community's lore with lei

marcH — 2021-12-20T17:21:55+00:00

> Maybe we could lead a page from "modern" social networks. [...] Imagine receiving an stream ...

A "stream" is in fact what our inboxes have already become a long time ago: a lossy medium EVEN for people not subscribing to mailing lists much. This happens because anyone can dump anything on anyone else's TODO list without needing any sort of permission. "Spam" is not just what people think, there are more subtle forms. I'm sure it was fine when the Internet was created and everyone knew each other. Not that great in today's information overload era and basically why:

> Kids These Days want nothing to do with it, and email has lost its charm with many others as well.

Where is the big "unsubscribe" button? To be in control again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRE728QiO7Y
"It's Impossible to Leave a WhatsApp Group" | Foil Arms and Hog

Digging into the community's lore with lei

marcH — 2021-12-20T02:04:17+00:00

> The email-based infrastructure underlying it all could become an implementation detail that users need not worry about if it does not interest them.

Hopefully because this is not quite there yet:

> lei q -I https://lore.kernel.org/all/ -o ~/Mail/floppy \
> --threads --dedupe=mid \
> '(dfn:drivers/block/floppy.c OR dfhh:floppy_* OR s:floppy \
> OR ((nq:bug OR nq:regression) AND nq:floppy)) \
> AND rt:1.month.ago..'

I'm not saying there is something wrong with this search syntax, I mean it shouldn't be required for a quick search before making a drive-by documentation or small bug fix.

But I'm not optimistic because http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html...
> Data is more tractable than program logic. It follows that where you see a choice between complexity in data structures and complexity in code, choose the former.

Whether email-based development infrastructure has a bright future or not, these tools seem extremely useful today.

Digging into the community's lore with lei

marcH — 2021-12-20T01:56:21+00:00

> > Maybe we could lead a page from "modern" social networks. After all, developers are a social network, too. Imagine receiving an stream of messages/patches from the developers you are subscribed to, and resending to your subscribers those that you find interesting/relevant...

+1, I've always hated this "IN or OUT" binary aspect of mailing list subscriptions. Memories of middle school and exclusive groups of "cool kids" :-)

> What about people who AVOID social networks because they see this as a PROBLEM, not a solution.

Whether it's coffee machines, Twitter, LWN comments, conferences, WhatsApp groups, dinner parties or direct messaging, "social networks" in a very broad sense have always and will always provide plenty enough of the "serendipity" mentioned in the article. Humans are extremely social animals.

Granted, the algorithms of some (a?)social networks are tuned to make money out of confirmation bias and irrational response but let's not throw the baby with the bathwater. Like so many others before it, "modern" social network technology is neither good or bad, it's what we make of it and in this case especially how we _pay_ for it. Funding it with our attention and brain time: now that is the bad idea.

> Then again, such a world sounds like fertile ground for news sites providing a broad view of what's happening in the community, so perhaps it's not an entirely bad thing.

Indeed.

Digging into the community's lore with lei

error27 — 2021-12-17T12:24:52+00:00

The b4 script is really nice.

Eventually all patches will have a lore link to the discussion and that will help me know if the static checker warnings have already been addressed or not so I don't duplicate reports. I guess I could search for the Fixes: hash instead.

Another thing that I'd like is if we could use lore to automatically create TODO lists. It's like your "dromedary" search but the results show a line of context as well as the link to the email. So if you are reviewing someone's patch and you think of an idea then you just add a line to your reply: "TODO: subsystem/prefix: clean up leaks in foo_bar()". Then if you need ideas, search for TODO and that line would show up in the search results. People could click on the link and read the email for the full explanation.

Digging into the community's lore with lei

Wol — 2021-12-16T12:23:20+00:00

What about people who AVOID social networks because they see this as a PROBLEM, not a solution.

What about uber-developers where you are not interested in 99% of what they're doing?

Cheers,
Wol

Digging into the community's lore with lei

dgm — 2021-12-15T22:11:02+00:00

Maybe we could lead a page from "modern" social networks. After all, developers are a social network, too. Imagine receiving an stream of messages/patches from the developers you are subscribed to, and resending to your subscribers those that you find interesting/relevant...

Argh

corbet — 2021-12-14T14:53:06+00:00

The last-minute changes to an article get you every time. Fixed, sorry for any confusion there. I blame Jake and his review comments :)

Digging into the community's lore with lei

nix — 2021-12-14T12:21:03+00:00

> So, while searching for "dromedary" finds occurrences of that word, "nq:dromedary", instead, only turns up occurrences that are quoted in text being replied to.

I thought "that's odd", and, indeed, nq: is "nonquoted text". You want "q" for the opposite.

(This alone is enough of a reason to try lei. All the other search features? Oh I'm sucking all my email into this thing. I wonder how hard it is to teach notmuch the same search features? Or, hell, to have them share the same index? It's all Xapian, after all.)

Digging into the community's lore with lei

smurf — 2021-12-14T12:07:37+00:00

Well, despite its decline, the people who built that Usenet thing really were onto something.

Digging into the community's lore with lei

ejr — 2021-12-14T00:23:28+00:00

public-inbox/lei & notmuch.

I'm revamping much of my olde Usenet-focused system. Is this a long-term direction?

Attribution

corbet — 2021-12-13T20:03:11+00:00

You'd think that, after all these years of watching the public-inbox list, I would have had a better handle on that. Sorry Eric and company! I'll find a way to work that in.

Digging into the community's lore with lei

mricon — 2021-12-13T18:38:10+00:00

Minor but important clarification: I am not the author of the "lei" tool -- it is developed by folks behind public-inbox. My involvement is mostly as a cheerleader.