Re: Bug#3253: Pine base64 bug
On 22 Aug 1997, James Troup wrote:
> Brian White <bcwhite@verisim.com> writes:
>
> > If it were a bug, I'd agree with you. Since it's not (it behaves
> > exactly as documented), we don't _have_ to track it.
>
> I can't believe you are seriously trying to claim that anything
> documented is not a bug, I refer you once again to the hypothetical
> example of a documented alias ls='rm -fr', is that not a bug?
Asside from your references to it's existance, I know of no place where
your example IS documented ;-)
If your hypothetical example atually existed, I feel certain that we would
all agree that, at the very least, it was stupid and malicious if not a
true bug. I'm also fairly sure that it would get dealt with whether a bug
report was issued or not.
The issue with Pine is not in that class.
The lack of a feature in other mailers is being used to declare an
isolated feature of Pine to be broken. The fact that Pine provides a
method for delivering those plain text files to those non-MIME compliant
readers is being ignored as the obvious "correct" use of the software.
Ian is correct in declaring that plain text doesn't need to be encoded. He
and I (and others) simply disagree as to who is at fault. I say the user
made a mistake when they created the attatchment. Ian says the software is
at fault for letting the user do that.
This bug may continue to be opened and closed into the indefinite future.
This has absolutely nothing to do with how we use the bug tracking system
for free packages. We have much more control over what we deliver from the
free software side. (Yet Another Good Reason For Free Software!)
BTW, if this haggling over Pine's MIME awareness was intended to get the
authors to free up their license, I can only say that it hasn't worked.
Pine's license is as restrictive as I've ever seen it. We can't even
distribute a .deb file for Pine under its current copyright.
Luck,
Dwarf
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