Re: tlug: e-Mailers [was:Mew on (X)Emacs the way to go?

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "John" == John De Hoog <washi@example.com> writes:

    John> "Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com> wrote:
    >> >>>>> "Howard" == Howard Abbey <habbey@example.com>
    >> writes:
    >> 
    Howard> Modularity rules,
    >> Amen, I say, amen! Brother Howard.
    >> 
    >> In other words, it's a different world over here ;-)

    John> And your job is to keep your world as small as possible? 
    John> <joke>

"Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."

Size is not good, if it means accepting Microsoft's standards of
software courtesy and interoperability:  "Titter, tee hee, oh,
Mr. Veedle, HORK! SNORT! We are [Microsoft], we don't have to care."

I have nothing against ease of use as such (although there are
powerful arguments against it, I'll leave exposition to Chris Sekiya;
I think they are balanced by equally powerful arguments in favor).

What drives me up a wall is the number of clients out there which suck
up to the lowest common denominator of user and then crap all over the
net (inter or intra).  They sell well (aka get wide distribution),
they have rabid advocates even among Linux users.  And they're a pain
in the neck for users of other software and system administrators.
There are presumably ones that don't; perhaps your buddy "Becky" is
one, but I don't get enough Becky mail to know.

To give _the_ _canonically_ extreme example, there's nothing easier to 
use than the "Stealth Mailer."  Says so, right in the six-or-seven-
times-a-day spam mailing promoting it.  (^^;  And look at the features 
it provides, without getting your fingers greasy (except from the
money you'll make, of course):  invasion of privacy, theft of service, 
denial of service attack, defamation of character, violation of RFCs....

The spammers are _trying_ to be assholes, of course.  Software
development processes that worry only about ease of use for the user,
at the expense courtesy and standards conformance, impose the risk of
inadvertant access to the status of fly in the ointment for ordinary
users who are just minding their own business and should _never_ have
to think twice about such things.

    John> I just noticed the existence, for example, of XCmail, which
    John> is one of those new upstart mail clients that actually
    John> handles the POP stuff for you, without requiring you to dig
    John> under the hood and get grease on your fingers.

By which you mean, I take it, that it provides a nice dialog box with
fill-in blanks for server, password, etc.  This is a GoodThang[tm],
which, for example, XEmacs[1] is belatedly trying to provide a
standard internal interface ("Custom") for.

And Debian and TurboLinux and doing the same thing, more globally for
the whole Linux distribution.  In orthogonal directions: TL is going
after the user directly with features that users see immediately and
like, such as smart configuration tools.  Debian is going after the
sysadmins by rationalizing the structure of configuration.  I guess
RedHat is too, but I've gotten sick of dealing with premature libc
ejaculations from RHL so I don't really know what they've been up to
since glint.

But this is a new branch of Linux/Un*x development, and it's going to
be pretty slow for a while (2 years?) from the point of view of the
Windose graduate.

    John> In any case, one of the selling points of Netscape's In-box
    John> Direct service is that you can view html right in your email
    John> preview window.

I can do that if I want to.  If I don't want, can I turn the HTML off
and still get the information, at least a one-line "Content-Description"?
That's what _I_ mean by courtesy, in this context.

    John> Not that I'm against modularity, of course; but some of the
    John> loops I've been told to go through just to get basic mail

Modularity is orthogonal to hoops.

Or could be.  Of course the modularity should be hidden from most
users.  rpm and dpkg should be taught how to tell you that if you want
MaileRex to do POP or IMAP, you need fetchmail too.  (dpkg I think
"suggests" it, but only in general.  It's not likely a naive user
would understand why, and quite possible that they would miss the
explanation.)  fetchmail itself should be packaged with an install
script that asks you who you are, what your password is (and advises
you to enter it every time rather than store it on disk ;-), and for
your list of pop servers.

This is conceptually easy enough, it's just tedious to implement.  So
it will take some time.

    John> functionality are too much for many of the people to whom
    John> Linux is now being sold as a Windows alternative, in the
    John> "battle for the desktop."

There are Linux hype-sters too, of course.  Individuals who want
no-brainer gadgets should not be advised to install Linux, not yet.
Linux does not support users like that yet.  At all, let alone well;
nor does it provide the gaudy garbage (YMMV, of course) that many
Windose users think of as a birthright.  Talking paperclips, indeed!

Some of those same users _should_ see Linux on their desktops at work
or school, because managing a Linux network or even just multiple
Linux boxes is much easier than doing the same thing with any
Windose-kei OS.  If NT 5 really provides a decent scripting language,
one with non-GUI access to the system configuration tools, that might
change.

But DOS 7 command.com still doesn't provide command completion; you
need to install Unix tools like Perl to get any hope of controlling
your own destiny.  And then you're still hosed because, of course, you
don't own the registry; Microsoft does, so Perl can't fix it for you.
And Windose 95?  Hit help, and it tells you to talk to your system
administrator.  When I first realized that there was _no_ help
provided by Windows 95 for whatever it was (I think it was SMB
workgroup naming), I screamed "F**k you, _I_ _am_ the system
adminstrator!" and scared my cat right out the window.  Fortunately
the answer was in the _other_ Samba HOWTO (or FAQ, or something).

It is highly unlikely I will consider installing NT on any system I
manage before version 6 comes out.  I might use it as a drop-in
replacement to upgrade from Windows 95 for students who insist on the
M$ GUI and tools.  But not for any system that requires real
administration or provides networked services.

Someday, Linux will do no-brainer configuration for typical single-
user workstation usage quite well.  Never as good as M$, I expect;
staying on that leading edge is hard work and will stay that way I
think.  But good enough that you can advise your mother to use Linux
"because it'll work well enough and I can help you with it."

Footnotes: 
[1]  Example chosen because I follow the developer's mailing list
carefully, not because I have any reason to believe it's a
particularly excellent effort.  We're still fumbling around with this
one, getting one's hands greasy is a religious experience for most of
us.

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