Mailing List Etiquette was freebsd vs. netbsd

[Aryeh Friedman]

On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 10:22 AM Chris Knipe <savage at savage.za.org> wrote:

>
>
> 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.
>

Extra and unneeded steps for a properly behaving MUA and but from your
point of view this is the very behavior that is *BAD*.

>
> 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.
>

You missed the point completely then.   People don't share
production/committed code via email they share snippets when asking for
debugging help and those are the ones that need to be 100% accurate cut and
pasted because some applications/languages care a great deal about
whitespace (like python).


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

If that is what you think you sure have not been on this list (or any other
FreeBSD mailing list) for any significant amount of time (people do it
everyday here).



-- 
Aryeh M. Friedman, Lead Developer, http://www.PetiteCloud.org