[Mailman-Users] Re: remove this?

[Bill Warner]

At 11:32 PM 5/8/01 -0700, Chuq Von Rospach wrote:
>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,

Sure it is.  It's what gives X the flexibility and power to do useful 
things which were not, or even could not, be anticipated by the developers 
in advance.  Really, I appreciate your concern but you don't have to 
protect me from myself.

>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.

Sure, why not?  What are you going to do, hide the rm man pages?  Disable 
"-rf" unless they get permission from you?  If it's their system, and 
they've decided they want to "rm -rf /", well then by golly I'll be happy 
to help.  I don't see why anyone should appoint themselves to be the rm 
police, or the List-* police.

>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.

The problem with this argument, as I see it (and have expounded in more 
detail in my message to JC), is that your attitude will actually make it 
more likely for sites, like mine, to kill these headers site-wide until 
they are no longer a problem instead of doing it selectively and working 
towards compliance with 2369.


--Bill