Re: RFS(2): autoreply - A safe, rate-limited auto-responder

[Dan MacNeil <dan@thecsl.org>]

Disclaimer: I am Chris's day job boss, the person who originally 
suggested Chris package auto-reply.

Back in August, I choose to download the tarball for auto-reply instead 
of using vacation, despite the fact that I had used vacation for some 
years.

As far as I can tell, vacation requires a home directory and auto-reply 
does not (albeit somewhat awkwardly). This is useful in mail systems 
where there are no home directories.  Generally, I found auto-reply 
somewhat easier to deal with, though it has been a while and I find to 
remember precisely why.

Also, for what it is worth, after deciding vacation was not suitable,

	apt-cache search reply

...turned did not turn vacation or another suitable package.

	




Florent Rougon wrote:
> Don Armstrong <don@debian.org> wrote:
>
>
> > The author(s) can spend free time in any way the author(s) wish to.
>
>
> I'm glad to learn that.
>
>
> > Likewise, Blars and myself are free to tell authors that what they
> > have written appears to be a waste of their time when Free alternative
> > "foo" exists. Just like you are free to tell me that responding to
> > your message is a waste of my time, and others can tell us that
> > reading this thread is a waste of their time.
>
>
> I was reacting to the "yet another vaction clone by someone who didn't
> bother to read the vacation man page" part of Blars' message, which
> seems to be overly harsh (and maybe untrue) if it is only meant to say
> "a free program with mostly the same features already exists".
>
>
> > Furthermore, the message above isn't written in the context of telling
> > the authors that they should never have written said software, only
> > that said software should probably not be included in the archive
> > because other tools already frobnicate better (or as well.)
>
>
> I don't think this was the only message carried by Blars' words, but I
> may have misunderstood him...