On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 1:36 AM, VICTOR TARABOLA CORTIANO
<vtc10@c3sl.ufpr.br> wrote:
>
> Hello Victor.
>
> Thanks for your reply.
>
That was a quick response.
> > In other words, google groups and yahoo are worthless crap.
>
>
> Not completely worthless crap, they have some nice features, but as a
> complete solution they are problematic.
>
Google groups messes up headers and yahoo groups appends 1000 lines
of useless html code into every message. That is the definition of
crap.
Whithout mentioning that you can't control what they are doing
with mail, they may as well been censoring some mail, who knows???
I agree they have some crappy stuff in them. I was not disputing that. But something can have both advantages and disadvantages. Just because it has big disadvantages, doesn't mean it's worthless. It can still have interesting advantages and be useful for some cases.
To phrase it differently, "Just because it has some crap in it, doesn't mean it's worthless crap."
>
> I could address your points one-by-one, but if you're the kind of person who
> considers `mailman` to be a convenient and effective service, then I believe
> no meaningful communication can occur between us, at least on this matter.
>
It looks like you are saying that mailman is very hard to use.
By who? developers? Normal users?
Normal users just go to a website, write their mail and click
subscribe. How hard is that??
Developers should be able to admin mailman very easily.
I see that we have different opinions on what is convenient and what is not. I don't want to ignore your questions, but if I'll try to argue point-by-point on the problems with mailman, we'll end up spending a lot of time. So I'll just take one point, out of the many I can choose, as a case study, and we can discuss that.
The point I'll take is: The fact that mailman sends passwords in clear text.
So, mailman sends password in clear text. As we know, this means that the password is vulnerable to attackers, who may then use it to gain access to the user's control panel.
(As you said I can also operate without a password, but let's assume that I want to keep my mailman control panel secure.)
You said, "Just don't put an important password there." You know what, maybe I don't feel like remembering another password in my life? Maybe I have enough passwords and PIN numbers and security codes to remember, and I just don't feel like adding another one to that list? You can say, "So write it down". Maybe I don't feel like finding a place to write it down and then remembering where I wrote it down?
The way I see it, the software is meant to serve the user. When the software requires the user to do many actions which are uncomfortable to him, it makes it not very good software.
And besides, maybe I want my mailman control panel to actually be secure?
> >
> > Why don't you mail the guy from Librelist and the FSF to see
> > what happens?
> >
>
> This is what I just did. I asked whether this is the proper place to
> introduce a project to the FSF, and was asked about the project, and then
> introduced it.
>
Mail the guy and someone at FSF. If you want I can talk with rms
about his opinion on this.
That would be great. I would have no idea who to mail at FSF: I wrote to this list because I assumed FSF people would read it. In any case, I'd be happy if you suggest who I should mail, and if you want to talk to rms that would be great.
> But there are many people who contribute to FOSS and whose
> technical skills are much less developed than yours. For these people, tasks
> that may be trivial to you, like administering a mailman server, may be in
> fact very hard. I've had these people in mind when I introduced this
> project.
That's why I said:
Fair enough for very small projects.
Those people won't be administering mailman, nor majordomo2 nor
any other mailing list software. They are non-tech users after
all...
They can go ahead and set up an mailing list in the service you
mentioned.
There are others too. For instance: resist.ca and riseup.net.
So, what's your point? Why are you attacking mailman?
My point: Librelist will be useful to many people so I hope the FSF will support it.
Regarding mailman, see my answer way below.
> Also, please cut down on the sarcasm and terseness when sending me any
> messages in the future. If this is unacceptable to you, you are free to
> ignore any messages I send to the list.
It may surprise you that I'm trying to help you.
I appreciate any help, and thank you for cutting down the sarcasm.
But if you seek help from free software people you shouldn't start by
saying that mailman is "1995 crap".
It seems that most of your resistance is regarding my statement that mailman is a bad program. If you find it offensive that I say that mailman is a bad program, then it will make for some hard communication between us. For example, I could have been offended by you calling Google Groups "crap". There are things about Google Groups that I actually like a lot. But I am willing to discuss its disadvantages objectively, and I expect people to be able to objectively discuss the disadvantages of programs like mailman even if they like the program.