Re: fetchmail: blatantly violates RFC's and corrupts PGP/MIME ma
On Wed, Feb 10, 1999 at 01:47:37PM -0500, ijr@po.cwru.edu wrote:
>
> On 10-Feb-99 Branden Robinson wrote:
> > Finally, I ask that either the upstream maintainers of fetchmail begin
> > showing some responsibility with regard to new releases. By this, I mean
> > that untested new features should not be enabled by default without
> > warning. This has happened at least twice in the past three releases.
>
> I ask that the debian X maintainer begin showing some responsibility with regard
> to releases. How many of your say, past 10 releases have been horribly,
> horribly broken? 6? 7? How many of these broken releases are because you
> didn't even install the packages before installing them?
This is absolutely rediculous. You have to understand X. X is a monolithic
beast. A complete build of every package that is associated with XFree
directly (aka in Branden's reign) would take more than ten hours to build on
an average system.
You *cannot* anticipate bugs in releases such as these. you also
cannot expect the package maintainer to test for brokenness in every corner
that he/she would not even think of using in the first place.
You attribute superhuman capability as being synonymous with common
sense. that is IMO seriously brain-damaged.
I say once again, people, leave Branden alone. He's doing a wonderful job
and IMO deserves a little slack. Anybody else in his place would have surely
fallen down on the job.
>
> > Mail is a deadly serious issue -- fetchmail is used by a great number of
> > Debian users and developers (witness the number of people on the lists who
> > have been seeing these corrupted PGP/MIME messages), and this may be one area
> > in which we cannot afford to follow the bleeding edge.
> >
>
> X is used by virtually everyone. Moreso, I would say, than a "great number".
>
> Fix your own crap before knocking someone else's.
My observation is, that people are angry at Branden far too often. Live with
unstable releases of X, or use obsolete stuff, or don't live with X at all
-- or get the binary tarballs from xfree86.org and see if you don't have to
continually tweak configuration. Your choice.
Personally I think Branden's statement about fetchmail is right on. The
upstream authors are also exhibiting some brain-damaged behavior. If the
upstream authors of such a trivial, task-oriented daemon cannot demonstrate
common sense, and continually add "features" that clobber peoples'
configurations (without notice too!) and cause loss of important data,
debian has to respond.
Besides, to 75% of the development community, email can be a matter
of life and death. I want 0% of my email to be lost. I want 0% of my email
to be using a broken authentication mechanism -- I'd give up X for a few
days in lieu of a broken release, but not these.
So, PLEASE, PLEASE people -- leave Branden alone. He devotes a goodly
portion of his life to debian.
--
..Aaron Van Couwenberghe... ..vanco@sonic.net.. ..aaronv@debian.org....
Berlin: http://www.berlin-consortium.org
Debian GNU/Linux: http://www.debian.org
"...Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing..."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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