[Mailman-Users] Re: remove this?

[Chuq Von Rospach]

On 5/8/01 11:09 PM, "Bill Warner" <lww at ictech.net> wrote:

> Since upgrading my Mailman installation to
> 2.x these headers have been the direct cause of new tech support calls,
> everyone of which costs money.

So solve the real problem -- which is create a FAQ item telling people how
to fix mail clients, not to rip stuff out of the system that will, in the
long run, make it easier for users to use the system. It's a short term
investment for long-term gain, but if people refuse to adopt the headers,
the client writers won't feel the need to adopt them, and you'll spend your
time walking users through subscription issues instead of having them
automated in the client.

> policy decision of which, if any, of them
> should go out on a particular list should be left to the list owner.

I disagree. Policy decisions should be made by people who can make them in
an informed way, not out of ignorance. X windows lets its users do REALLY
STUPID AND DESTRUCTIVE things, simply because they want to. "because they
want to" isn't a good enough answer, or else we ought to just give everyone
root access on a computer, and if they want to "rm -rf /", well, we should
let them.

There are some actions and decisions you have to know what you're doing
before we should allow to happen. And in this specific case, there's a
larger issue as well -- if sites turn this stuff off widely, it discourages
their adoption into the clients, which screws over the overall adoption. So
you may want to turn it off, but that causes problems for the
internet-at-large in the future by discouraging adoption of these standards.

Now -- again, if you want to do it, be my guest. It's your system. But when
you start asking us to do it, or make it easy, or show you how, that's a
different matter -- because while you might think it's better for your site,
that's at odds with the overall goal, and there are bigger issues that take
precedence here (IMHO). Again, short term investment, minor pain. Long term
gain, long term advantage. But that gain happens only if we do everything we
can to encourage adoption, and the mail client authors adopt as well. That
won't happen if people can easily dump this stuff, because they're new,
different and people think they're therefore icky -- and don't do the
research or want to.

It's like cough medicine. It tastes rotten going down, but long term, it
makes you feel better. Sometimes, you take a little pain now for the future.

IMHO, this is one. I'm firmly against anything that makes it easy to remove
these lines, including ANY hints in any FAQs or documentation. I don't
believe Barry's quite that hard-ass about it, and it's his call, but at some
point, we have to say "this is worth having, and someone has to take the
first step".

> But I submit that
> deliberately making this kind of thing harder than it has to be, a kind of
> "Father Knows Best" attitude,

Sure. You know why? Because many times Father DOES.

> is antithetical to the roots of todays Open
> Source movement. 

Sorry, don't buy that at all. I don't see that as any part of open source.
You have the right to make any change you want to open source, but it's
generally the experts who write this stuff, and they should write it based
on their expertise -- and that means making philosophical decisions like
this. You have the right to change it personally, to argue with the experts,
or to throw it out and use someone else's software with a more compatible
philosophy, but the experts do the work, and they get final say on what is
and isn't right. 

> It has always seemed childish to me for
> someone to reply to a message only to say, in essence, "I know the answer
> to your question but I'm not going to tell you because you are either not
> worthy enough in some way, or I think you are going to do something silly
> with the information."  Why not just answer the question, or ignore it?

We did answer the question -- just not with the answer you wanted. If we
ignore it, it just gets asked again, louder, with a "why are you idiots
ignoring me?" whine attached...

> It's really not productive to try to guess some ones background based on
> one or two posts to a mailing list.  Just because I don't have the time to
> read mailman-users everyday, or hunt down every RFC that impacts it's

Just as it's not productive to try to guess how software like mailman
"ought" to work without doing the research needed to know why decisions were
made...

> I know, childish at best...

Yes, very.