On Tue, Oct 16, 2007 at 09:46:19PM +0200, Rado S wrote: > =- Patrick Schoenfeld wrote on Tue 16.Oct'07 at 21:24:22 +0200 -= > > > In fact mutt is the only mailer I found not supporting it > > Return-receipts being standard replies with a preformatted content > (nothing special about them), mutt _does_ support them, just not > built-in as you would like it to be so that you don't have to tweak > the config as freely as you must, sorry: _can_. Imagine all that > could be usefully done with external resources built into mutt, it > would become as chunky and bulky as the bad rest. > It's not a bug but a feature that not everything that is possible is > built-in but must/can be accomplished elsewhere. I have always, and still do find this argument to be um, less than well thought out (to put it extremely mildly). Adding features does not inherently add bloat; and in general, if adding a commonly requested feature requires the addition of a bunch of crap code, then the current design of the program (or perhaps the design of the implementation of the new feature) is broken. So if you are balking at implementing a feature for this reason, it's probably a good sign that a rewrite (of something) is needed. If a function is e-mail related, and commonly supported by other mailers, then it seems to me Mutt should have built-in support for it too. Mutt is a Mail USER Agent (not a mail DEVELOPER agent), and it should interoperate with other mailers, and should do everything that users commonly want to do with mail without a lot of fuss. The only things that should require fuss are things that are not commonly wanted by common mail users. And don't forget that just because YOU don't find any value in a feature, that doesn't mean it's not a feature that common users want... Otherwise, mutt will not suck less than the rest. Almost any feature can be passed off to some helper program, but very often doing so is annoyingly clunky and/or inflexible. Very often it's hard for a user to get a helper program which works sanely in his environment. And ultimately, who wants to have to install 100 programs to deal with mail? But this is where the current philosophy is headed... add 100 features, install 100 programs. Linux users are lucky in that most such programs are commonly pre-installed with their distro, and the design philosophy of Mutt generally reflects that fact. But Linux isn't the only game in town, and the "Unix Philosophy" development model is not very scalable in such a context, especially if you have to deploy 1000 Unix workstations that don't come with any of the helper programs you need to make your application work in your environment (and most especially if they need different configurations, preventing one from easily creating, say, a tarball with all the required software). -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -=-=-=-=- This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it will result in undeliverable mail due to spam prevention. Sorry for the inconvenience.
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