Mailing List Etiquette was freebsd vs. netbsd

[Chris Knipe]

On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 4:06 PM Aryeh Friedman <aryeh.friedman at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Simple - don't email it. If you do, attach it as an attachment (MIME is
>> there for a reason)...
>>
>> There's GIT / CVS / Take your pick for a reason... :-)
>>
>
> If you don't like email then you should not be using FreeBSD because for
> better or worse the community has standardized on email as the primary tech
> support venue and thus absolutely needs to have something that can be used
> to give tech support (including 100% accurate cut and pasting).
>

And again - there's absolutely -nothing- wrong with that at all, I never
said that there was... Millions of companies provide support to millions of
users every day using email... That being said, I get a 80 character plain
text email from a company as "support," I deem that as unprofessional, and
the email will more than likely just be deleted.  We live in modern times,
unfortunately.  Presentation matters, whether you like it or not.

Cut & paste from the attachment, then you won't have any formatting issues
from any MUAs, but I guess it's too much effort to open the attachment.
There's plenty of solutions (UUEncode/BASE64, as you so nicely put it, has
also been trialed and tested over many, many years, just FYI - it also has
the benefit of < 80 characters wide), 80x25 is not one of them, and whether
you like it or not, you will -never- get the world to adhere to a 80 (or 74
or whatever) character wide email. The world has moved on, deal with it.

The fact is, you should be committing your code to a repository, and
checking said code out of said repository when you need it. In an open
source environment, said code is also publicly viewable using any half
decent web browser (I guess GITHUB is also doing it wrong?)  No, code
should not be shared via email - and if you do then so be it - your choice,
not a requirement. You don't need to email the code, all you can do is
email a URL to your commit / diff... Again, too much effort to open a URL
right?  I forgot that in the old days without GUIs, we couldn't even double
click.  I guess you still can't today.

Again, it's the minority that is sharing code via email... In fact, I would
say very, very, very little people do it.

Oh - and I love email.... Never said I didn't.

-- 

Regards,
Chris Knipe