So I get and agree with what he's saying about how GitHub duplicated email, but as a millennial who uses Vim, I find GitHub much more intuitive and useful than sending patches via email. In general, I disagree with the issues he has with GitHub - most of them are wishy washy disagreements that could easily be solved by adding things to GitHub or using a chrome extension.
IMO the only real, logical reason they need to keep using email is "Email works just as well as GitHub, and we've already been using email, so we might as well continue using it." Which is a good reason on it's own - there's no reason to try and come up with problems with GitHub. (Again, not saying GitHub is perfect, but I don't think the reasons he gave were particularly valid.)
I don't really feel that you being a millennial or using vim is relevant.
I have no idea how you would go about getting github to implement whatever functionality is desired and even so would come with the following disadvantages
-- Requiring a chrome extension limiting people to using chrome + a singular website vs any email client under the sun
-- wouldn't work offline
-- Presumably it would be more challenging for sight impaired individuals to use a js heavy website vs their email. They stated they had existing contributors who were so impaired.
-- Since people still presumably do a lot of discussion via email it would mean using at minimum github AND email some of which would refer back and forth to other discussions.
-- Relying on github would require tying free software infrastructure to a single non free software tool. Recalling bitkeeper this didn't go well last time.
-- Hosted github costs additional money.
-- The primary and perhaps only benefit would be making it easier for people to come in off the street and drop patches with minimal effort but this would actually cost effort to manage and the kind of individual who can't or likely wont figure out how to use existing infrastructure may not be an optimal contributor in any case.
Basically your solution involves not only effort to create tools that don't exist, the cooperation of a third party, but the end result would almost certainly be objectively worse in a number of ways.
I feel like you didn't really address any of the things the actual expert on the matter said and just hand waved his entire argument away.
Catehorically not using extensions, regardless of their permissions system, sounds less like "security concerns" and more like "fear rooted in ignorance." Continuing to use some of them (ad blockers), regardless of said "security concerns", sounds like cognitive dissonance.
> that could easily be solved by adding things to GitHub or using a chrome extension
I don't believe "adding things to GitHub" is easy unless you're the GitHub product manager. Also requiring some extensions would mean auto-verifying all the requirements on submitted PRs and half of them ending up with "redo it our way and submit again".
Not impossible, but likely annoying to contributors and spammy for anyone receiving PRs.
Just try to use GitHub Enterprise for 400 or more users. You get a bare metal image of the virtual machine with no replication, load balancing, etc. Nothing more for a huge price. I don't know how they scaling public version.
Sorry, but "adding things" won't solve all problems. Often adding more is what makes more problems, and removing something is what makes things work. And sometimes it's removing the html, css and js around your text.
IMO the only real, logical reason they need to keep using email is "Email works just as well as GitHub, and we've already been using email, so we might as well continue using it." Which is a good reason on it's own - there's no reason to try and come up with problems with GitHub. (Again, not saying GitHub is perfect, but I don't think the reasons he gave were particularly valid.)