On Wed, Jul 26, 2006 at 11:31:39AM -0600, Lyndon Nerenberg wrote: > >Why would you want a MIME encoding solution in the default > >installation? I mean, really, what do a large majority of systems need > >MIME for? > > 1) Character set support. These days I suspect the number of Unix users > who can live completely within the US-ASCII glyph set are in the minority.
Again, I doubt that an MUA having this functionality is really going to be in high demand on the large majority of firewalls, web servers, mail servers, or other such servers which are not meant to be the end point to reading mail. Of course, that does not mean that it is not useful, but I do believe this means it is outside the scope of the default installation, which, to my understanding, is to be a minimal installation with minimal feature-set and minimal problem points. > 2) PGP/MIME and S/MIME. Even without doing crypto processing, MIME lets > the MUA display only the human readable parts without contortions. Again, I don't see this as applicable to the problem that ought to be solved by the default installation of OpenBSD. The purpose of the default base installation is not be be a full on installation designed to fit every users need, but the smallest basic set of generally useful functions that allows for easy expansion and addition. Under this notion, it seems easier and more productive to relegate such additional features to packages and Ports. > MIME has been around for 14 years. There's no excuse for any MUA not to > be able to deal with it at least minimally. In the case of /usr/bin/Mail > that means recognizing content types and only displaying text/* sections > when printing to the screen. It doesn't *have* to be complicated. It would still represent an unnecessary additional effort for an arguably minimal amount of gain for the developer's purposes, imo. Of course, this is not to say that I have anything really great to say here. I am not an official developer, and I don't really have that much clout around here, so I can't really say. What I can say is that if I had the choice, I would not put in an MUA that supported MIME for just the reasons you have expressed here, even though I use OpenBSD as a Desktop Development Workstation and I deal and use PGP, MIME, and my mail client on a daily basis. -- Aaron Hsu <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <http://www.aaronhsu.com> XMPP/Jabber/GTalk: [EMAIL PROTECTED] | ICQ: 153114301 AIM/Yahoo: NoorahAbeer | MSN: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
