I think most of these advantages are overblown. Glad I read this though because I didn't know about the 'patience' diff algorithm and I've been looking for something like that for years!
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.”
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.
Comments
I think most of these advantages are overblown. Glad I read this though because I didn't know about the 'patience' diff algorithm and I've been looking for something like that for years!
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.