getting off this mailing list

[Ed Cogburn]

Stephen R Laniel wrote:

> On Sat, Jul 02, 2005 at 04:18:56AM -0400, Ed Cogburn wrote:
>> No offense guys, but this argument is starting to sound just a *little*
>> strange.  :)  It doesn't matter which is "better" to use, procmail or
>> fetchmail, because truthfully, to an end user they both *suck* as far as
>> ease-of-use (sorry, but I've used both).
> 
> I realize the point you're making, but I'd like to point out
> that fetchmail and procmail are two totally different
> programs serving totally different needs:


Yep, you got me on that, they do different things, sorry.  Since discovering
kmail & knode in KDE, I haven't used either one, nor anything like them for
years.


> I agree that procmail and fetchmail have bad UI. But I think
> we could build a good UI on top of both -- which would be
> good, because they're both infinitely expressive tools for
> handling their specific tasks. They each do one thing and do
> it well -- which is what open-source tools are supposed to
> be about.

Well.... I would argue that any good idea is good, but usually only in
moderation.  :)

Given that fetchmail is nothing more than a shallow wrapper around the POP3
internet mail transfer protocol, I don't think a command-line tool like
that is sacrosanct, especially for a GUI environment like GNOME or KDE,
where the command-line methodolgy for program-to-program communication is
actually inferior and less flexible.  Its like saying we should right a GUI
frontend for ls, rather than simply make the system calls to collect the
directory information directly from whatever tool you're using to manage
files.  :)  If you're using mignight commander, or a GUI file management
tool like krusader, or konqueror, or whatever GNOME uses, do you still want
to be limited to only what ls can do for you?