On Mon, Mar 26, 2007 at 04:54:40PM +0200, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> On 2007-03-26 08:43:56 -0600, Kyle Wheeler wrote:
> > On Monday, March 26 at 04:27 PM, quoth Vincent Lefevre:
> > >>if you'd like to reverse a stupid decision made by the distributor.
> > >
> > >So, Mutt's configure shouldn't allow stupid decisions.
> >
> > This reminds me of a quote by Doug Gwyn:
> >
> > UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because
> > that would also stop you from doing clever things.
>
> That's precisely why configure-time options should be avoided if
> possible, because they stop the user from doing clever things, in
> one way or the other. They may also make software behave completely
> differently from one platform to another, which would confuse the
> user.
I think we all missed that "you" in the quote isn't just the user. "You"
there also refers to the sysadmin ("rm -rf /" as root, for example),
and by extension, to the distributor. Also, we've already noted the
cost differential between run-time and configure-time options, which
makes it impractical to have everything run-time configurable.
- Dave
