Re: CONFIRM'ing replies only in smartlist for announcement lists
Edward Betts <edward@debian.org> writes:
> > How about a "shameless-plug:" archive control field, so that when
> > people install "majordomo" it says "Say, did you know that the Debian
> > project recommends the `smartlist' package for mailing list
> > functionality"? :-)
> Yes, debian needs this. I would suggest a bit of a RMS tone to
> it. So you install gimp-non-free and it explains about the problems
> of software patents and suggests you use .jpeg or .png instead of
> .gif or .tiff
I guess the major question is how this is managed; perhaps a new
debconf verbosity "dimension"; we already have importance for
functionality, now how about "political" warning preference levels:
1. Warn me about any package that is not DFSG compliant
2. Warn me about packages that have had to have lots of stuff
wrapped around them to make them work because of their license.
3. Warn me only about EVIL packages :-)
4. Ultimate apathy
5. I have sold my soul to the DEVIL! Alert me when I am using a
free package where there exists a non-free alternative.
There are also some other problems with this I can see; it should not
be the package maintainer's decision about recommended packages, as
they may be biased. So the emphasis would have to be on all such
messages to be completely non-biased.
> > I suggest we configure smartlist on the debian announce lists so that
> > it will confirm the posting of replies to announcement mailing lists.
> > And if it can't be configured to do so, a wishlist bug should be
> > raised so that it can.
> Have a look at smartlist, it is quite cool, a lot of it is done
> using procmail, so that anything you can do in procmail. you can do
> in smartlist. I would be quite confident in saying that procmail can
> send e-mails, so this probably requires no modifcation to smartlist.
> > In short - I'm not suggesting we stop replies from being let in at all
> > (ie, a form of censorship), I am suggesting that users should have
> > replies bounced back with "Are you sure?" prompts.
> Thinking about it, that is cool, espically if it can be set to only send
> confirms on replies.
Right. So then it needs to be added to the docco in
/usr/share/doc/smartlist (actually I just installed it and it was in
/usr/doc/smartlist, tut tut).
Feature requests like this should really be tagged against a function,
and all of the packages providing that function that the debian
project "recommends" would then have that wishlist item added. Though
hopefully the project would not recommend more than one or two
packages for each function :).
> > Damnit. This is a problem with free software, it's just so damned
> > efficient that new packages can spring up with a full feature set
> > completely replacing the packages that I am used to using.
> My friend has that problem, he always writes stuff to solve a
> problem, tells me aobut it, and i point out the debian package that
> already had the solution in it.
I once wanted to have a quick command to show me who all the mail in
my mailbox was from. So I put in my .bashrc "alias from='grep ^From\
/var/spool/mail/sam'". Sourced it, and it worked. Accidentally typed
it in another window I had open and it worked again. I was very
confused at this, typed "which from" and realised what was happening.
After that, I gave up NOT going to the distribution in the first
instance.
--
Sam Vilain, sam@vilain.net WWW: http://www.vilain.net/~sam/
GPG public key: http://www.vilain.net/~sam/gpgkey.txt
Reply to: