I think there are many developers who prefer mailing lists; therefore, to make a project succeed, it’s best to offer mailing lists. However, I wasn’t saying anything against having forums! It’s great to have forums, but they should be bidirectionally gatewayed with mailing lists: same data, different presentations.

If they offer only forums, I’m pretty sure they’re going to lose some developers.

Now, if there were an RSS feed for their forums, that would at least make it possible to read them through an interface of the readers’ choosing…

The point I’m trying to make is that both RSS and email are, effectively, APIs: once the data is flowing in those protocols, other parties can (and do!) whip up any interface they want to it. They’re not limiting. But most web forums don’t provide a real API — you’d have to screen-scrape or something in order to interact programmatically with them. In effect, this means that the only way to interact with a forum (or at least these forums) is via the one interface they provide to your web browser, where as you can interact with mailing lists via a choice of interfaces.

So the dogma here isn’t “mailing lists are better”. It’s “APIs are better”. Mailing lists just happen to be an API for which many clients have already been written (those would be all the mailreaders out there, as well as the many mail< ->web gateways like gmane, etc).

Sorry that I didn’t express that clearly enough in the original post.

Totally agree with you about the bug tracker, of course.

Perhaps you prefer mailing lists but that’s just your preference, and shouldn’t be promoted as part of the dogma of ‘how to release software’