Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Why is "popular" software hard to change? [was some damn OT thread]

[Andrew Suffield]

On Mon, Aug 25, 2003 at 04:13:13PM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> Andrew will say that this isn't enough, we need M-F-T and M-C-T
> headers, too.

I wouldn't go so far as to say "need". Rather, we've got them in part
and they work, so they're *a* solution, and nobody else is proposing
"solutions" that work as well. I'm quite amenable to anything else
that does the same job or better without introducing new problems.

For that matter, I've never used M-C-T either.

> But that's a separate problem, and _could_ have been
> immediately addressed in a standard conforming way simply by naming
> the headers X-Mail-Followups-To and X-Mail-Copies-To while the draft
> RFCs wend their way through the IETF process.

That's pretty much a dead end; the IETF cabal shot it down. I believe
it was personal (DJB proposed it).

While the argument for following standards is fairly sound, I don't
accept the similar argument that says "We shouldn't do anything that
*isn't* in a 'standard'", particularly since 'standard' means
'document released by one of a small set of arbitrary organisations'.

> [3]  Except that the people I trust on the matter say those headers
> are broken and shouldn't be used, which suggests they might never
> become standard, perhaps as a purely political issue.

The argument basically goes "But you could implement *this* instead,
which is much more general", where the counter-proposal (encapsulating
more data in Reply-To) was extremely difficult to implement and would
be misinterpreted by every MUA currently in use. Then the draft RFC
expired because nobody felt like swimming upstream against the IETF
cabal. The whole thing stank of politics to me, which is normal for
the IETF and why I don't set much stock in what they decide to approve
or dismiss.

-- 
  .''`.  ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield
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