Ok, let's go beyond general principles about mailing lists and be more concrete in thinking and see if a truly censorship proof dev & distribute architecture is possible.
Let's work backwards from this desired command line:
youtube-dl -U
That command automatically downloads latest version. (Important because Youtube, Vimeo, etc changes constantly and breaks old youtube-dl versions.)
We have 2 main areas to implement:
1) the code artifacts: a source code repo (and binary releases for download) ; for Linux kernel, I think this is "www.kernel.org"[1]
2) the workflow: the issues / bug reports / pull requests ; for Linux kernel collaboration, a popular mailing list is "[email protected]"[2]
If youtube-dl switches from github to mailing lists, how would the "-U" command work? Would somebody need to setup a SMTP server (or at minimum, a SMTP email account) dedicated to youtube-dl? Would youtube-dl then use SMTP protocol to scan the mailing list for which server has the latest code artifacts?
Does making youtube-dl act as a pseudo email-client make it RIAA proof? Are SMTP servers beyond the legal reach of RIAA?
EDIT to reply: This article is about the developer workflow, not about what the end-user software should do.
I understand that but I think it's productive to go beyond that and think out loud what a realistic implementation could be to help end users. Besides, many end users are also the code contributors.
[1] https://www.kernel.org/
[2] http://vger.kernel.org/vger-lists.html#linux-kernel
Let's work backwards from this desired command line:
That command automatically downloads latest version. (Important because Youtube, Vimeo, etc changes constantly and breaks old youtube-dl versions.)We have 2 main areas to implement:
1) the code artifacts: a source code repo (and binary releases for download) ; for Linux kernel, I think this is "www.kernel.org"[1]
2) the workflow: the issues / bug reports / pull requests ; for Linux kernel collaboration, a popular mailing list is "[email protected]"[2]
If youtube-dl switches from github to mailing lists, how would the "-U" command work? Would somebody need to setup a SMTP server (or at minimum, a SMTP email account) dedicated to youtube-dl? Would youtube-dl then use SMTP protocol to scan the mailing list for which server has the latest code artifacts?
Does making youtube-dl act as a pseudo email-client make it RIAA proof? Are SMTP servers beyond the legal reach of RIAA?
EDIT to reply: This article is about the developer workflow, not about what the end-user software should do.
I understand that but I think it's productive to go beyond that and think out loud what a realistic implementation could be to help end users. Besides, many end users are also the code contributors.
[1] https://www.kernel.org/
[2] http://vger.kernel.org/vger-lists.html#linux-kernel