Vote: Force Reply-To: sounder via List

[Samuel Thurston, III]

On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 12:25 PM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 6:03 PM, Samuel Thurston, III
> <sam.thurston at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 11:08 AM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> If only because it will irritate all those annoying Debian purists who
>>> get all arsey about RFCs and theoretical concepts and who would rather
>>> that Linux was used by 3 people who truly grok it in the fullness.
>>
>> Sure, while we're at it why don't we just throw out all the standards
>> and do things just the way people expect their pc to work.
>>
>> Oh wait I think there's a company in Redmond that already makes an OS
>> that way...
>
> Generally, these days, Linux /does/. It has a Start menu, a taskbar &
> a tray. It has folders on the desktop with a navigation pane down the
> left hand side and toolbars under the menus inside windows. It has an
> [X] button at the top right corner to close, but also, Alt-F4 works,
> as does Ctrl-W and Alt-Tab and Alt-F for the File menu and so on.
<snip>

Unlike with Windows, these things are all configurable. I can make it
all go away if I want. I can mimic the Mac UI too. As I mentioned in
my forward looking UI post, the basic UI paradigm hasn't shifted in 20
years.  this isn't news, it's not "Ubuntu copying windows" it's just
the paradigm people are used to.  Blame XEROX Parc. The GNOME desktop
was headed this way before Ubuntu came along.  KDE is much more
windows-like, but it's not the default.

Sure OO.org will read and write MS Office docs, but by default saves
them to an open standard.  The IM client has MSN capability as well as
every other major service. The email program may look distastefully
like Outlook but it doesn't work natively with exchange server,
instead preferring email standards to proprietary methods.

That the installer has stopped asking people to define their own
partition layout does not mean "we use MS's partition layout"

But more importantly none of these points display Ubuntu or Linuxes in
general eschewing standards in favor of functionality.

> Debian tried to do the right thing, for a dozen years, and achieved a
> "market" penetration of the square root of sod-all. It was outdone by
> Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake and various other companies. Free versus
> paid-for, and paid-for won.

Now you're confusing a standardizing issue with the Free Softare Holy
War.  These are very different.  Debian was never standards-pure.
What it was, was pure to the Ideals of Free Software, and that, along
with a terrible organizational structure and a decade of infighting,
kept it only the 3rd or 4th most popular distro from a field of
hundreds.

> Is this a theoretically-pure Unix-like mailing list, or is it a
> mailing list for human beings?

Sounder was originally a dev-oriented list..

Look, all the griping about the reply-to header comes down to one
thing, the people who want it changed are asking for a change to be
forced on those who don't because they can't write a mail filter that
picks up both CC's and TO's, or because once in a while a direct reply
lands in their precious inbox and causes them to redirect their
attention for a few seconds, which, not a bad enough offense on its
own, must be prosecuted by a preachy reply.

The cons of the switch outweigh the pros, it's been discussed to
death. It's not the right thing to do. But if it will make people shut
up about it, I'm fine with it.    Half the traffic on the list these
days is people complaining about the reply-to. Since list admins have
stated that "it isn't going to change" and that hasn't ended
discussion on it, I don't know what will.  Those of us who are
RFC-hugging linux elitists, by your estimation, probably won't keep
moaning about it for years after it gets changed if it does.  But it's
pretty well-evidenced that the reply-to advocates aren't going to quit
their whining unless it changes (at which time, I suspect, they will
find something else to gripe about).