Bug#933: Pine wants to post my email reply, and other problems
Dale Scheetz writes:
>
> Within a few minutes the user can determine what NNTP server to use,
Not necesarily. As a very knowledgable user at my university, I tried
to install a news reader, and the only way to find *a* let alone *the*
NNTP server was to run strings on rn. Certainly not for the faint of
heart ;)
> Are you suggesting that it is the responsibility of the pine installation
> to determine which of the various mail-delivery-agents is in place and
> then properly configure pine for that agent? I don't think so!
No, because mail agents all behave the same to the user. (For the most part)
> I didn't say I didn't know how to do this, I said I didn't think I should
> do it.
It is definitely the package maintainers responsibility to provide
sane defaults after the package is installed.
Generally in the case of a news reader, those "sane" defaults can only be
determined after asking for the NNTP server or some other information.
> > >Choice of an NNTP server is intended to be left up to the end user!
> >
> > Consider the case where the end user has limited technical knowledge.
>
> Then he probably shouldn't be trying to post to news groups.
Technical knowledge is not the only knowledge relavant to newsgroups...
Consider the case where the end user just got a new job. Should he not
be able to fire up any newsreader that's installed, and continue about
his business, or should he spend half a day trying to find the
overworked sysadmin to figure out which NNTP server to use?
--
Carl Streeter | "Etiquette-wise, there is no proper time
streeter@cae.wisc.edu | to use the phrase 'It sucks.'" --Dogbert
Just another Perl hacker | "I'm a heartless bastard." --Linus Torvalds
Ask me about Debian/GNU Linux. | http://www.cae.wisc.edu/~streeter/
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