On Wed, Mar 06, 2002 at 10:16:24PM -0800, Will Yardley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
> Sven Guckes wrote:
> >
> > mutt does not strive to be popular with everyone. after all, all
> > those bad mailers were written to *fit* some people - and they
> > certainly do! so dont take them away from those - they deserve it!
>
> i think this statement is a bit elitist.... simply because a tool is
> powerful doesn't mean that it can't also be fairly easy to use. it can
> be overwhelming to be faced with all that power at once; however that
> doesn't mean that the tool isn't still worth using.
FWIW, this was the historical attitude of the mutt developers. I've
been around since about version 0.12, with a very long hiatus somewhere
in the middle there. Sven was also around for much of that time. The
thought was "mutt is small and fast and powerful, and is for hackers.
Not all of its features are easy to use, and we don't care. We're not
going to let it get bloated." So Sven isn't just making this up. On
the other hand, that was many moons ago, and despite accumulating some
bloat and not being as small, mutt is just about as fast and as useful
for the people who liked it back then, while perhaps (I'm not sure about
this part) being easier to use for a broader audience. The danger of
making it somewhat easier to use for a broader audience is that they'll
want to then go farther, eroding its utility to this original group of
users. But I don't think that this is a big danger (especially if the
developers, some of whom are from the original group and many of the
rest of whom would have fit right in there, put their collective foot
down in such situations.) So I say go ahead and write a configuration
tool, if it makes you happy, and share it with the world, if it makes
other people's lives easier. At the same time, the core of mutt will
never have a bunch of dialog boxes when you first start it up asking you
helpful questions to set it up (though someone could write a script that
did so and that would be fine) and there will probably always be users
who'd be happier with Evolution or Mozilla pine or Eudora or (gasp!)
Outlook or AOL. Mutt can be for a lot of people without any problem,
but no, it's probably not for everybody.
-Daniel
--
Daniel E. Eisenbud
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
"We should go forth on the shortest walk perchance, in the spirit of
undying adventure, never to return,--prepared to send back our embalmed
hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms."
--Henry David Thoreau, "Walking"
