On Fri, Feb 05, 2010 at 08:19:01PM +0100, Rado S wrote: > You, however, expect all the solutions to be put into the core > C-code
Not *all*... just the ones that make sense. The Unix Philosophy
doesn't preclude maintainers from using their brains to decide what
features do or don't make sense. Dogma does.
> while I suggest keeping it "outside" wrapped around it (or
> plugged in, once we have a plug-in interface ;).
Plugins are fine, but there's been resistance to even adding that.
> Those "wrap-up" solutions can be accumulated and delivered
> centrally, too, like on the wiki. It need not be shipped with each
> package release. Think of Firefox and it's add-ons.
The fact is, main-line code is much better maintained than code that's
outside the core. Yet another reason in support of monolithy.
> > The quality of Mutt has not suffered for having {smtp built-in} ...
> > how can that not mean that Mutt is better for having it?
>
> With this argument you justify _literally_ any feature
Yes, exactly. That's my point. Any useful feature is justified for
consideration... If you have someone willing to write the code, and
the proposed design integrates cleanly, you should need to justify NOT
adding it. Not the other way around. If a feature clearly does
negatively impact performance or stability, or clutters up the
interface, or whatever, then you use your brain to decide not to
include it. Otherwise, there's no practical reason not to. Don't
reject features for no REAL reason. Obviously this is a judgement
call, and the maintainers should decide what is useful or not useful,
what is damaging or not damaging. But the mindset should be to
include features unless there's a legitimate, quantifiable reason not
to.
This mindset is what led Rocco and others to attempt a fork of Mutt a
few years ago, which in turn prompted a flurry of development activity
from Brendan and others. Progress is good.
--
Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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