Hey, I just come from reading your recent post about mailing lists being 
easier to use than most people think.

I am quite a beginner when it comes to contributing to free software. I 
am only experienced at using pull requests, and the stuff I've 
contributed is not really that big of a deal, just a few dozen SVG icons 
and some commits for a game jam game.

One of the main reasons mailing lists seem hard to get is because you 
can't really "recognize" one that easily. You can understand a twitter 
thread with just a a screenshot, the same with a discourse forum. And 
you can join those conversations fairly easily (if you have an account).

When I google images of mailing lists, its kinda hard to understand 
whats going on, and some are not even showing how they look like. And in 
order to see how it goes, you have to join one and wait for an email to 
come up.

I think there that some mailing list archive their threads in some 
websites, but its kinda hard to find them. Right now I am writing this 
and I have no idea of any previous posts, I am just joining and creating 
a new subject without knowing who will respond, although that helps to 
keep it a bit more anonymous, and quite exciting too, I guess.

Anyways, I decided to join this, and I hope I get to learn how to use 
and participate in mailing lists more often!

Hey, thanks for reaching out.

Mailing lists come in many shapes and sizes, and because a lot of the
software is old, they might not look very intuitive to use. Don't worry.
you'll get the hang of it in no time.

> I think there that some mailing list archive their threads in some
> websites, but its kinda hard to find them. Right now I am writing this
> and I have no idea of any previous posts, I am just joining and creating
> a new subject without knowing who will respond, although that helps to
> keep it a bit more anonymous, and quite exciting too, I guess.

This website in particular, lists.sr.ht, has a great UI. Let me direct
you to a list which gets some more traffic:

https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-discuss

Even if you aren't logged in to sr.ht, you can still browse the
archives, subscribe and even post a new email. Keep in mind that for any
mailing list, the web interface is *for archival purposes only*.
Participation in the conversation is done solely via email.

> When I google images of mailing lists, its kinda hard to understand
> whats going on, and some are not even showing how they look like. And in
> order to see how it goes, you have to join one and wait for an email to
> come up.

Here's a quick recap of how mailing lists work, both for discussion and
git send-email:

To discuss something, send an email. Some people might reply to you, and
it becomes a normal email conversation, except new people can jump in at
any point.

Once you send a patch using git send-email, people can quote-reply to
specific parts of your diff, requesting changes and discussing features.
This is something lists.sr.ht archives handle exquisitely well, have a
look at this thread:

https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-dev/patches/24010#%3CCD3PDCLB7IX8.38AFM68HJZQDU@taiga%3E

If you're subscribed to a mailing list, occasionally you'll see an email
or patch pop up on your inbox, and you can reply to it normally (though
make sure to hit Reply All).

> I am quite a beginner when it comes to contributing to free software. I
> am only experienced at using pull requests, and the stuff I've
> contributed is not really that big of a deal, just a few dozen SVG icons
> and some commits for a game jam game.

Here's a great interactive guide on how to use git via email:

https://git-send-email.io

> Hey, thanks for reaching out.
>
> Mailing lists come in many shapes and sizes, and because a lot of the 
> software is old, they might not look very intuitive to use. Don't 
> worry.  you'll get the hang of it in no time. 

I mean, thanks to you, this has been quite a nice experience

> This website in particular, lists.sr.ht, has a great UI. Let me direct 
> you to a list which gets some more traffic:
>
> https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-discuss

That looks amazing! Yeah I just took a look at a few of those, and the
UI really makes it look like a simple, minimal forum.

Now that I think about it, I saw a few Google "forums" that seem to be
mailing lists, I just did not recognize them as that, but wow

> Here's a great interactive guide on how to use git via email:
>
> https://git-send-email.io

Thank you so much for this. Now all I gotta do is find some simple
projects where I can actually contribute something xD, right now I think
I am too much of a programming novice to touch actual code, but I think
I could help with some documentation. If you know something that needs
something like that, let me know.  I am also pretty decent at making
icons, so email me if you want something like that 😁

One last thing, I am not sure of how to make text have a width of 72
columns in Thunderbird, and I don't really feel like switching to
something else. However, if you have any personal suggestion, let me
know!

> I could help with some documentation. If you know something that needs
> something like that, let me know. I am also pretty decent at making
> icons, so email me if you want something like that 😁

sourcehut itself is an open-source project, and you can help with the
documentation by fixing typos, correcting links and the like. Just
browse man.sr.ht, and if you see something out of the ordinary, fix it!

Here's the upstream repo: https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-docs
and send your patches to ~sircmpwn/sr.ht-dev@lists.sr.ht.

> One last thing, I am not sure of how to make text have a width of 72
> columns in Thunderbird, and I don't really feel like switching to
> something else. However, if you have any personal suggestion, let me
> know!

useplaintext.email shows that Thunderbird supports format=flowed, which
means it should sort itself out.

FYI: the emails sent here are correctly wrapped, so unless you did it
manually, Thunderbird's doing a good job.

> sourcehut itself is an open-source project, and you can help with the 
> documentation by fixing typos, correcting links and the like. Just 
> browse man.sr.ht, and if you see something out of the ordinary, fix 
> it! Here's the upstream repo: https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-docs 
> and send your patches to ~sircmpwn/sr.ht-dev@lists.sr.ht. 
Well yeah, I will try and do some changes at some point. One of the 
things I was still confused was how to implement the changes in the code 
itself. Like, lets say I am the receiver of the email with the changes 
being done. But, how would I merge them into my repo? Just copy paste, 
or what?
When I do stuff with GitHub I usually make a fork and then a pull 
request to the original upstream. And the mantainer just merges the 
changes there, I am still a bit confused with that side of emailing git 
changes
> useplaintext.email shows that Thunderbird supports format=flowed, 
> which means it should sort itself out. FYI: the emails sent here are 
> correctly wrapped, so unless you did it manually, Thunderbird's doing 
> a good job.
Fair enough then! I still have some doubts confusion, since the email 
writing UI is different. if I click "Reply to thread" from sourcehut's 
website, I can only type in plain text with a fixed width. But if I hit 
"reply all" from Thunderbird, then it allows me to choose different 
formatting styles and it does not have a way to actually limit the width 
of the text. So right now, this email will be sent with autowrapped 
text, but will be sent as plain text. Please let me know how it looks in 
your client!

 > Fair enough then! I still have some doubts confusion, since the email
 > writing UI is different. if I click "Reply to thread" from sourcehut's
 > website, I can only type in plain text with a fixed width. But if I hit
 > "reply all" from Thunderbird, then it allows me to choose different
 > formatting styles and it does not have a way to actually limit the width
 > of the text. So right now, this email will be sent with autowrapped
 > text, but will be sent as plain text. Please let me know how it looks in
 > your client!

Alright, it gets autowrapped and it changes in my client, so I am sorry
if you are seeing this. At least the website displays it with the proper
text width.

I guess I will stick to writing this stuff with Vim, I am sorry for that
xD

> Well yeah, I will try and do some changes at some point. One of the
> things I was still confused was how to implement the changes in the code
> itself. Like, lets say I am the receiver of the email with the changes
> being done. But, how would I merge them into my repo? Just copy paste,
> or what?

I'm not exactly sure how this is done in Thunderbird (there's probably a
plugin), but you can pipe the contents of the email, verbatim, into a
command called `git am`. This will process the commit information and
add it to your log, and you can then push it upstream.


> So right now, this email will be sent with autowrapped text, but will
> be sent as plain text. Please let me know how it looks in your client!

I see perfectly wrapped email. You can see for yourself here on the
archives:

https://lists.sr.ht/~sfr/public-inbox/%3C8cc07d37-8181-f478-1bce-1fa639c9e2af%40tilde.cafe%3E#%3C17ca8b97-aaae-4e45-99a1-d745b4bef0f1@tilde.cafe%3E

> I'm not exactly sure how this is done in Thunderbird (there's probably 
> a plugin), but you can pipe the contents of the email, verbatim, into 
> a command called `git am`. This will process the commit information 
> and add it to your log, and you can then push it upstream. 


Alright then. Will check it out sooner or later

> I see perfectly wrapped email.

Thank you, I guess I will just stick to what I was doing then. it is 
autowrapping for me, but I guess that most plain text clients can 
transform it into the proper width. And this is fine, since it looks 
alright both on my Thunderbird and in my phone with K9-Mail, that 
usually fails to properly wrap text if it has fixes linebreaks

A win win situation it seems :D

It looks like my previous message did not get quotes right, they have 
the same color as normal text. This is getting confusing, but I will try 
and keep it simple from now on.