=- Derek Martin wrote on Fri 29.Jan'10 at 17:45:28 -0600 -= > There has been a tendency in some quarters to blindly and rigidly > advocate that following the Unix Philosophy is the One True Way, > which has often hindered progress.
What kind of progress do you mean? Maybe your goals or "ideal world" intentions differ from others, and neither your nor theirs(!) are "right" for everyone. > [although my main point, which I may not have made well, is that > using the Unix Philosophy as justification to not implement a > beneficial feature in mutt is mostly kind of lame]. If there are no limits, every code will tend towards a massive "do-it-all-in-one-app" nightmare, wasting resources for every other user not interested in all the supported features for a given task. Think of Mozilla-Suite or OpenOffice scales just to "ls -l", what a gain. > In potentially a lot of ways, it's just easier for users to deal > with monolithic apps. Sure, but then they should go there, you don't have to turn each existing app into such beast, there are enough of them. :) > As I said, I believe that if you need to have complexity, it > should be in the code, not on the user end. The glue to accomplish complex goals needs not necessarily to be in the user end, it can be put in meta-code (wrappers), which can be constructed by advanced users to share with other user. See, this already happens for mutt. > Sure, Mutt has SMTP functionality now, but it took about a decade > and a couple of changes of maintainers for that to happen. And I still don't consider it a good decision. :) > The benefit of adding this functionality seems so obvious; yet it > took forever to convince the devs it was a good idea. This is, > IMO, a fine example of where a monolithic application wins, and > arguing "no way, unix philosophy!" loses. I favour the "user should know (the basics of) what he does/ uses" argument over the user-convenience. The mass of unknowing users not wanting to care for how all the stuff in the background works are free to join the OutLook/M$ crowd by expanding "their" branch of mutt into OL. > Of course, in this case, Mutt could provide its SMTP functionality in > a separate program; as long as that separate program is behind the > scenes, and the user doesn't need to do anything "special" to > configure it, then you can have your Unix Philosophy and eat it too. "Normally" this is the case, because "normal" systems have a functional MTA already or it's sufficiently easy to configure with modern UI menus. Now you can say that it is not normal or easy to setup an MTA as single user, but neither of us can "prove" what "normal" is. > The advantage of a monolithic app is that, in cases where one is > called for, most users usually won't care about those issues, and > there's usually a lot less for them to worry about / manage with a > monolithic app than with a bunch of smaller programs. Really? You still have to give all the details required for (for example) the MTA part; does it matter that you do it in the big-app on another page or in a separate app? In both cases it is "elsewhere", remote to the MUA part. The question is: do you follow the crowd (convenience) or make the crowd follow you (learn how things work)? -- © Rado S. -- You must provide YOUR effort for your goal! EVERY effort counts: at least to show your attitude. You're responsible for ALL you do: you get what you give.
