On Wed, Oct 17, 2007 at 07:52:03AM -0600, Charles Cazabon wrote: > Actually, one of the things that makes mutt suck less than other MUAs is that > it *doesn't* have additional hundreds of little-used "features" to cause > bloat, bugs, user confusion, and UI complication for no real added benefit. > > As a related example, I'm still disappointed SMTP support got added. Actually I think this is a fine example of why that argument is total nonsense. Since SMTP support has been added, in what measurable way has it caused Mutt to suck more? Is the memory footprint *substantially* larger? Has it caused mutt to become noticably slower? My desktop has 2GB of RAM. Mutt's memory footprint would have to go up by a factor of about 50 before I would even notice, and more like 100 before it would be a genuine concern. My CPU is a 3GHz Pentium 4... the load on my system when Mutt is running is negligible for all but the most computing-intensive operations (and even then, it's disk load, not CPU, that's the problem). Adding the requested feature will add at most a couple of KB, and have zero noticable impact on system performance. If you're still running Mutt on a 486 with 16MB of RAM, it's probably time to upgrade your machine... but if you don't want to, and you don't care about new features, just run an old version of Mutt. 1.4 still works, and has even had (fairly) recent security updates. But your argument is completely bogus when it comes to deciding whether or not to add a feature to Mutt. Especially since, if there really was some compelling reason to keep the footprint small, features could be added as loadable modules, which is now decades-old technology. The bloat that you're talking about other mailers having is caused by needing to load huge desktop inter-process com libraries on top of huge GUI toolkit libraries on top of underlying system libraries. Mutt will never have this problem, because it doesn't try to be a GUI desktop environment application... But even if it did, on modern hardware, running these apps just isn't problematical. Balking at adding genuine features in the name of preventing bloat is simply asinine, and clinging to those ideals is an attitude that's fitting for computing's stone age, but by and large, if we're talking about genuine features that people use (even if the set of people doesn't include you personally), just doesn't make sense. When developers use this argument, what they're really saying is either they oppose the feature on philisophical grounds (which is not a good reason), or they're too busy/lazy/disinterested to work on it (which is a good reason, since no one's paying them to do it). -- 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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