launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Martin Pool <mbp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 12 June 2010 05:09, Francis J. Lacoste <francis.lacoste@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi Deryck,
>
> For me the power of the mailing list metaphor comes from the fact that
> Answers, Bugs and Code Reviews are about conversations between people, so to
> me the experience should be as close to email as possible.
>
> Also although, I have no data to back this up, I'd bet that most of our core
> users follows conversations in these forums through their email client. It's
> one of the distinctive feature of Launchpad that we have tight email
> integration.

I think it's true that most core users use email very heavily, and yet
this is partly because it's a bit hard to follow conversations in any
other way.  It's only through a mail client that I can practically
find out "what's new in the projects I care about since I last
looked."

(I would like to do a thought experiment, and perhaps an actual
experiment, of turning off all my Launchpad mail and then see how it
feels.)

Obviously mail is pretty important and heavily used and yet it's
becoming a bit of a last-century technology.  It is poorer in many
ways and the comparative advantages it did have five years ago of
quickly dealing with bulk data and being available offline are fading.

I'd like to see the tight integration remain & improve but I don't
think mail should define the user model of Launchpad.  Rather: there's
a conversation going on and we need to map that into mail.

-- 
Martin