On Wed, Aug 23, 2000 at 12:38:41AM -0700, Steve Lamb wrote: > This list does matter. Every time someone says, "I want something like > this" you know what the immediate knee-jerk reaction is? "You don't want > that. What you want to do is this." That is utter bullshit and you know it. /me is trying to stay out of the fray but can't resist this bait. I have to disagree. Strongly. There area great many things that people suggest as "features" or "why doesn't it work this way", which have been tried, and either don't work, produce security holes, or introduce (generally unnecessary) complexity into the system. Not every request, but a great many of them. Let's face it, GNU/Linux *is* riding on 30 years of Unix design, and a lot of different ideas *have* been tried. Some succeed, many fail. This is a mature system. Peturbe it gently. One of my sayings in regards another software product which features a "users ballot" is "beware of what others ask for, you may get it". Greeting suggestions with skepticism is IMO very healthy. It forces the person proposing the idea to think about what they're asking for and why they want to do something a particular way. It makes them look at existing tools and measure their true fit to the task. With sufficient bull-headedness, truely good (and even a few bad) ideas will rise beyond the "I want something like this" stage, and emerge as...Perl, exim, mutt, fetchmail, vim, wget, screen, VNC.... to name a few tools I find myself thankful for daily. OTHOH, violent negativism is bad. IMO the list has been more than tolerant of your wants, Steve, but my own patience is waning. -- Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://www.netcom.com/~kmself Evangelist, Opensales, Inc. http://www.opensales.org What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand? Debian GNU/Linux rocks! http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/ K5: http://www.kuro5hin.org GPG fingerprint: F932 8B25 5FDD 2528 D595 DC61 3847 889F 55F2 B9B0
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