Reply to post: As always, it's easy to sneer

As always, it's easy to sneer

I'm not a Linux kernel person. I'm also not a young person: the first mail client (which would not then have been called a 'client') I used was called 'mail', and for all of the 1990s and most of the 2000s I used rmail and then vm in emacs to read mail. But now I'm kind of over having to maintain my own email client (still more my own sendmail...), and since I use a mac, I use the Mac mail client which is mostly fine. And I've used that since, I think, 2006 or so. I use it in plain text mode, of course, except when I have to talk to someone where rich text is going to help. Other than an iCloud account (which I don't use really) I use a non-major email provider (not google or microsoft or ... in other words), talking POP3 so I'm never relying on someone else's system for long-term mail storage. And it's mostly fine (obviously not completely fine) and I have a bunch of rules set up to shunt mailing lists &c to the right place. And I have quite a lot of mail in this system: something like 10% of my home directory is email.

So, I tried the obvious thing: use git format-patch to make a patch, of well-behaved code (no long lines, no non-ASCII characters), pasted it into an email to myself, looked at the resulting email when it arrived. And of course it's got MIME noise in it (not much noise, but enough: mostly quoting of '=' I think).

So if I wanted to start doing Linux kernel stuff (I don't) then I'd need a way around that. I certainly can work out how to send patches via 'git format-patch' / git 'send-email' (and I've done that in the past), but I have to deal with the other end of it: is my normal mail client going to mangle patches on the way in? I don't know, actually. Does 'git am' defang MIME? I don't know. Perhaps I will need a completely new mail client which is better behaved. So now I either need to start using that and work out how to move all my mail into it, or I will need two mail clients with all the chaos that means. Perhaps I could solve that by having a special email address for LKML mail and a client which reads only that: that would probably work. But, well, it's a good thing I don't want to do this because the thought of sorting it all out is not fun.

I don't think a proprietary system is any kind of solution (so in particular I *don't* think that, say GitHub issues are any kind of answer). An email-based system is probably actually fine, but such a system should be easy to use with mail clients that people use, and not require them to set up some completely new client, which is only easy if you don't actually have any existing email.