Openness vs. Comfort

[Polytropon]

On Fri, 12 Jun 2020 19:16:55 +0200, Evilham wrote:
> On dv., juny 12 2020, Vincent DEFERT wrote:
> [...]
> > 1. Why mailing lists?
> >
> > I assume all of you have perfectly healthy eyes. Great!
> > Unfortunately, this is not my case. For me, reading plain text 
> > messages
> > is a torture. I made an effort in the beginning, but it is not 
> > possible
> > in the long term.
> 
> 
> Mailing lists are accessible if you use the right tools.

I'd like to mention something very useful: When you use
mailing lists with a MUA, you can store messages locally
(using the MUA's "sorting tree" functions). Web resources
sometimes disappear, and if you have kept a bookmark, it
will lead to a 404 page, so it became useless; as mailing
list messages are "place and content" in _one_ thing, you
do not depend on any further tools. Depending on the storage
format (mbox or MailDir), you can even use plain old grep
to search for something specific. Your own messages will
also automatically (!) be stored in "Sent messages" (or
an equivalent thereof), so you can revisit what you wrote
or what you replied to, at any time, without requiring an
Internet connection. Sure, you can store web forum posts
in plain text files too, but that has to be done manually,
or "Save as..." with "as text" for the whole page, but
what if there's pagination and you're on page 7 of 9...
yes, it's not that concenient.



> That being said: there are also support forums :-) if that fits 
> your workflow better, give it a go!

That's true, FreeBSD offers them for many years. And there
are web resources and a Wiki. I don't know if IRC is still
a thing, though. :-)



> > 3. Comfort and Openness
> >
> > FreeBSD has a great base system and a great text mode installer, 
> > but
> > what's the point in installing it if managing applications is a 
> > mess and
> > asking for help a curse?
> 
> 
> This shouldn't be the case, and if it is in your use-case, the 
> best way to keep that from happening is to document the issues and 
> raise awareness.
> I expect e.g. CURRENT to be rough around the edges when it comes 
> to the ports tree, but it's not unbearable; and the quarterly 
> branch for RELEASE / STABLE shouldn't have these issues, the 
> latest branch can have some of those issues, but that's why it's 
> latest.

OS version and ports snapshots can be used in any combination
the user desires (with certain limitations of course, but
generally it's possible to use today's ports tree with a
RELEASE OS version, or the RELEASE ports tree with a CURRENT
OS version - those are edge cases, just to illustrate the
independence).





-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...