using the right tool for the job!

[Lenny Foner]

    Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2001 23:32:48 -0400 (EDT)
    From: address@hidden (Greg A. Woods)

    [ On Wednesday, July 18, 2001 at 20:12:53 (-0400), Lenny Foner wrote: ]
    > Subject: using the right tool for the job!
    >
    > In this case, the right tool for the job is a URL, and

    Actually, no, in this case the method of distribution was part of the
    point I was making....  I guess irony doesn't go very far south of the
    border.....

To say I doubt this so-called explanation it putting it mildly.
I think you just didn't think through the implications of your
actions, and are trying to backpedal now that someone's called
you on it.  And I don't really care to hear yet another excuse
about how you're so much cleverer than anyone else in doing this.

And judging from the number of private messages I've received thanking
me for calling you on this, I'm willing to bet that quite a bit of the
list just didn't get your so-called irony, either.

    > -NOT- repeated, broken transmissions of 100K attachments.

    repeated?  there were four parts.  all four arrived once each in my own
    mailbox.  If you received multiples then your MTA, or one upstream from
    it, is in really bad shape....

I got 3 parts with -no- indication in the body of (a) sequence
numbers, (b) what order they should be placed in, or (c) MIME headers
or separators of any sort.  -After- those 3, I received a final
message -with- MIME headers in the body, and which claimed to be
multipart/mixed and base64-encoded, and which apparently included a
copy of the message headers inside the MIME encoding, which is pretty
bizarre.  The 3 raw-data messages -did- have MIME headers in them (but
not in the message body), but those headers are routinely suppressed
by my mail reader (RMAIL) because I don't really care to see them on
every single message.

Thus, since the user-visible effect was four messages of trash, I
didn't bother to go back and inspect the headers carefully until now.
They just looked like junk, and RMAIL certainly won't reassemble them
for me even now that I know what's supposed to be going on.  I don't
know a lot of mailers that will, actually.  If you'd sent a URL, on
the other hand, I could have followed it in one keystroke.

As a result, I simply deleted all four pieces immediately.  I'd rather
not waste my time reassembling and decoding them by hand.  And since
you didn't actually supply a URL, I feel no particular desire to try
to repeat your search and guess at which one you meant.

Clearly, you expect people to be running only certain kinds of mail
readers, and do not care if you spam them with half a meg of crap
isntead of 100 bytes of URL---yet you've been pretty vehement about
efficiency, smaller-is-better, portability-is-better, and similar
sorts of arguments when it comes to CVS.  I guess we know how to
interpret such statements now.

In short, you seem to believe that anyone who isn't running your
particular environment, for whatever reason, is an irredeemable
cretin.  I don't happen to share that assumption, and I doubt most
of the list does, either.  But it colors all of your messages.

    > Please don't ever send large attachments to large lists again.

    Hmmm....  I'd swear I've said the same thing myself once or twice.....  :-)

Then why did you do so?  Just to demonstrate that you don't care
whether you spam people with garbage?  Seems like a revelation
which you shouldn't be so quick to bring to our attention.