> I think most of these advantages are overblown.
One thing that wasn't mentioned as an advantage of a mailing list is the index a mail client provides for discussion. This allows one to easily see which messages have been read, who has responded to whom and the ability to jump to a particular message in the discussion.
Github, on the other hand, mixes the overall diff with comments, so if there are a lot of comments, and the diff is large, then it requires a lot of scrolling to find a given comment. It also takes some time to find a given comment and see if it someone has responded to it.
> Finally, creating patches by hand with diff can take advantage of other options, like annotating the hunk headers with which C functions are affected (using the -p flag), and the choice of various algorithms such as “patience.”