Design notes and philosophy
---------------------------
+public-inbox spawned around some basic ideas
+--------------------------------------------
+
+* Public, non-real-time, archivable communication is essential to
+ Free and Open Source software development.
+
+* Contributing to Free and Open Source projects should not require the
+ use of non-Free/non-Open Source services or software.
+
+* Graphical user interfaces should not be required for text-based
+ communication.
+
Challenges to running normal mailing lists
------------------------------------------
1) spam
public-inbox-mda(1)
* public-inbox uses SMTP for posting. Posting a message to a public-inbox
- instance is no different than sending a message to any open mailing
- list.
+ instance is no different than sending a message to any _open_ mailing
+ list. Any existing spam filtering on an SMTP server is also effective
+ on public-inbox.
* readers may continue using use their choice of mail clients and
mailbox formats, only learning a few commands of the ssoma(1) tool
public-inbox host becomes unavailable, users may still directly email
each other (or Cc: lists for related/dependent projects).
+Why git?
+--------
+
+* git is distributed and robust while being both fast and
+ space-efficient with text data. NNTP was considered, but does not
+ support compression and places no guarantees on data/transport
+ integrity. However, an NNTP gateway (read-only?) is possible.
+
+* As of 2014, git is widely used and known to nearly all Free Software
+ developers. For non-developers it is packaged for all major GNU/Linux
+ and *BSD distributions.
+
+Web notes
+---------
+
+* Getting users to install/run ssoma (or any new tool) is difficult.
+ The web views must be easily read/cache/mirror-able.
+
+* There may also be a significant number of webmail users without
+ an MUA or feed reader; so a web view is necessary.
+
+* Expose Message-ID in web views to encourage replies from drive-by
+ contributors.
+
+* Raw text endpoint allows users to write client-side JS endpoints
+ without hosting the data themselves (or on a different server).
+
Copyright
---------
Copyright 2013, Eric Wong <normalperson@yhbt.net> and all contributors.