I’d like to see email clients offer a nice one-click “rebase on top of latest” button.

Dang. I never thought of email like that, but I wonder if email+git+UI would help for complex conversations.

Sounds a little bit like Google Wave.

Wave seemed to me to be an unimaginative copy of other threaded comment implementations. The indentations seemed to waste valuable space on each page. Allowing anyone to edit anyone’s post seemed insecure. If I hadn’t known it was Google, I would’ve thought it to be a bad college project.

> Allowing anyone to edit anyone’s post seemed insecure.

Insecure in what manner?

To me it's no more insecure than a VCS - sure, anyone could edit anyone else's code, but version history was always there.

There’s a difference between interjecting “What he was trying to say is...” and changing the words he used; those weren’t his words.

Now I'm sad.

You should look at the git mailing list. They actually send patches via email using the git format-patch and git send-email commands and have complex discussions around some of the patches.

It kind of does: https://public-inbox.org/README.html It's used for LKML (and many other lists) archives: https://lore.kernel.org/lists.html

(but it's read-only, there's no rebasing, people still use old-school e-mail clients)