Re: [Tools-discuss] The IETF's email mess [was: RE: Large messages to 6man list]

[Theodore Ts'o <[e-mail]>]

On Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 07:40:52PM -0400, Martin Thomson wrote:
> 
> There are many factors at play here, most of them not being
> technical in nature. Fundamentally, this is a matter of discipline
> in communications, something that tooling is not well suited to help
> with. It is a human problem.
>
> ...
> 
> As a community, we could continue to hold the line in various
> ways. We could stick to silly and tiny message size limits, treat
> top posters as pariahs, and other employ equally ineffectual but
> exclusionary tactics to “encourage” compliance and homogeneity. The
> result being further marginalising contributions from new people and
> setbacks on efforts to improve diversity.

Ultimately, this is a community decision, and it very much is more of
a social rather than technical problem.

For what it's worth, the Linux kernel development community have
chosen to impose "silly" tiny message limits, and its mailing list
servers will reject e-mail with text/html or which exceed the message
size limits (originally, 40k; I believe it's 100k these days).
Furthermore, community members will gently (most of the time) correct
new community members who top-post.

Does that mean that community is dominated by old gray-beards?  Not
hardly.  An analysis for the number of contributors to the Linux
kernel over time show a consistent number of new, first-time
contributors every Linux kernel release:

                     # of developers
vers  release date 1st time  total #   source

6.1   2022-12-11      303      2,043   [1]
6.2   2023-02-19      294      2,088   [2]
6.3   2023-04-24      250      1,971   [3]
6.4   2023-06-25      292      1,980   [4]
(6.5 hasn't released yet; give it another week or two)

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/915435/
[2] https://lwn.net/Articles/915435/
[3] https://lwn.net/Articles/915435/
[4] https://lwn.net/Articles/915435/

For the calendar year 2022, there were a total of 5,034 unique
contributors, with 1,741 of those developers being first time
contributors.  These developers were responsible for 86,660 git
commits, and a net additional 3.7 millions LOC to the Linux kernel in
2022[1].  Hardly a moribund open source project!

Hence, at least for Linux kernel developer community, using a strict
plain text e-mail standards[5][6] hasn't prevented this community from
attracting and bringing in new, productive contributors.

[5] https://docs.kernel.org/process/email-clients.html
[6] https://useplaintext.email/

Now, the Linux kernel community is not the same as the IETF community,
and what works for Linux kernel may not work for the IETF.  But I
don't think it is self evident that a community is doomed become
irrelevance, with new contributors fleeing in horror, if chooses to
standardize on plain text e-mail.  Ultimately, this is a choice for
the IETF community as a whole to make.

    	 	      	  	     	  - Ted