What I see here is a spectrum. At either end of this spectrum are the logical extremes of our two viewpoints. I do not believe that either of us intends to advocate these extremes. What we are after is agreement on where to draw the line. I don't believe that it is possible to make a blanket call on this.
As you so rightly point out, individual cases must be made.
Another, particularly valid, point that you made is the one about requirement. All software projects attempt to achieve a set of requirements as efficiently as possible. Exceeding requirements is a dangerous waste of resources, as that often involves making poorly informed guesses regarding what the client might want. Even if you guess right about what they want, you are still rarely right about how they want it.
An open source project must rely on its user community to provide requirements. (Developers may, of course, double as users.) I will admit that we are currently in the realm of a poorly informed guess on this one.
It would be good to remember this for future (v3, 4, 5) discussions.
Peter M. Goldstein wrote:
Taken to its logical extreme, it implies chaos. For example, let's say a client sends out of order MAIL, RCPT, and DATA commands. Shouldn't we be handling that by sending the message? I mean all the necessary information has been provided. So why not? Doesn't my unhappy client have a right to complain?
Again, extremes (perhaps even hyperbole) and grey lines. ;-)
The problem has more than one dimension. There is that of robustness.See my other emails about my opinion as to the correct way to resolve this issue.
All of the approaches that you advocate are desirable features and add to robustness.
Another dimension is that of accepting Serge's invalid email converstaion. Is this violation one that we wish to be tolerant of?
I believe that it would be useful for JAMES to be tolerant of this one. My test team uses shell scripts that send email like this. Their test scripts would break without it. Quite honestly, there is not a chance that I could bring myself to write an actual production application that used this feature, though.
If the rest of the group does not agree to supporting this, it is not something that I am going to get worked up about.
Cheers
ADK
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