What makes our git own git repo unusable?
https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;
I personally find that quicker to get around in than github.
You have to swipe the cursor over "https://git.postgresql.org/git/postgresql.git" and copy; how lame.
CGIT is so much nicer. It also serves up tarballs out of tags. If you do a "git tag foo-123" and push it out, then on your CGIT interface, there will be a foo-123.tar.gz URL for download (as well as .bz2 and .zip), pulled right out of the repo.
Still, either is light years ahead of github's presentation of repos.
> What makes our git own git repo unusable?
I know; WTF? From grandparent's comment I got the impression that Postgresql must be using CVS, or just tarballs in a FTP directory or something (and that someone kindly made a git repo and put it into GH).
Unfortunately, email lists are not easy to browse if you're not subscribed and browsing past messages from before you described isn't that easy. The easiest way I've found around that problem is to use an email to NNTP gateway like gmane. Though that makes me wonder why project discussion isn't managed via a newsgroup as opposed to an email list.
For my own site, I rejected the awful Pipermail (default archiver with GNU Mailman) with its brutally ugly presentation format and text-only.
I found an alternative called Lurker, with a better web interface and some of the features you're mentioning, like threading.
I further customized Lurker. I gave it a button bar with custom icons, and hacked it to support in-line HTML (when people post HTML to the mailing list, it is integrated into the archive as HTML). Because that is dangerous, of course, I wrote a comprehensive HTML cleaner for that.
I welcome HTML in my mailing lists; it's time for mailing lists to retire "text only" rules. It improves the formatting of text, letting you use typewriter fonts, italics and bold appropriately, and real bullets.
Here is an archive message with in-line images, another benefit:
http://www.kylheku.com/lurker/message/20131110.004036.5ed128...
Here is discussion where you can see a branched tree view:
http://www.kylheku.com/lurker/message/20121127.210005.0ca78d...
Lurker mods: http://www.kylheku.com/cgit/lurker/
HTML cleaner: http://www.kylheku.com/cgit/hc/tree/
This lexically analyzes the HTML and filters out all unwanted tags, or unwanted attributes of otherwise wanted tags.
mbox archives reveal people's e-mails; you have to control access to those.
That does look better compared to other web interfaces I've seen in the past (though you still have to hover over the icon to view details of a message like the author and subject).
One decent interface I've seen is public-inbox (https://public-inbox.org/git/). It presents an overview with the subjects and threading and allows for downloading mbox files or using an atom feed link.
https://sourceforge.net/p/lurker/mailman/message/31487163/
TL; DR: Irrationally against all HTML in mail archives, even if properly cleaned. Thanks for Lurker, though!
Not the same as a mail client, but once you opened an individual email there's threaded structure.
> and downloading the mbox file requires one to authenticate with the server.
It does, but also says “Please authenticate with user archives and password antispam” - it's just to make automated extraction of email addresses a bit more work.
Yes, but it's much more cumbersome to navigate the thread compared to using an actual mail client. If web pages of mail archives could present an overview pane for navigating messages, it would go a long way to making them usable in a browser as opposed to just posting links to the immediate parent and the set of children for a given message.
Though I wish that having a NNTP gateway (or using NNTP as a primary method of communication for a project) was the standard as opposed to using a mailing list since it would make viewing past messages before subscribing to a newsgroup trivial.
It does, although discovery of the feature as well as the feature itself could use some improvement. In the header there's "Thread:" and the associated button displays the structure. You can also open a whole thread, but I don't find that particularly useful. The download mbox link inside a message will give you the whole thread as well.
And I'm even worried about those... what will happen in a few years/decades from now, when the generation of devs that are using mailing lists is not active anymore?
I remember I wanted to check out what was happening in Postgres, since it's my favourite database. But the sheer complexity of getting to the code diffs and comments and all that... I quickly gave up, because the environment was rather unfriendly to newcomers (actually, I didn't completely give up, I just browsed the Github mirror, which was the only usable part of their version control).
And I'm not blaming them, it works well for the core devs, but they can't expect many new contributors (and contributions are even things like documentation, tests etc.!). Which is a pity.