bogus bogotuning

[Greg Louis]

On 20040128 (Wed) at 0819:43 -0500, Jason A. Smith wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-01-28 at 06:40, Greg Louis wrote:
> > I argue, precisely, that anyone who understands what bogotune does and
> > how it works would not use this option.  With that few messages, the
> > user is safer to stick with bogofilter's default parameter values (or
> > with values obtained elsewhere on a reasonably sized corpus).  Although
> > anyone can make the one-line change that David suggested, I think it
> > sends the wrong message altogether if we offer it officially.
> 
> The only objection I have seen anyone raise is that it will most likely
> produce garbage results

Well, it's quite likely to produce no result at all a lot of the time,
but that's relatively harmless.

> causing people to complain

And possibly leading them to configure parameters that cause them to
encounter lots of false positives and false negatives that they
wouldn't have had if they'd left the defaults in place.

> All I am asking is that you allow the user to run it with a suitable
> warning, which will prevent the complaints and still allow the user
> to experiment with the command without patching and recompiling while
> they are waiting to accumulate more email messages in their archive.

The reason this reasonable-sounding request has no reason is that
bogotune is not going to be any more useful than trial-and-error
without a reasonable number of messages.

> I have already had to tweak the default parameters in order to achieve
> better results, but I am only able to guess at numbers since you won't
> allow me to run bogotune to even just experiment a little.

Your guess is likely to be _better_ than bogotune's.  That's the whole
point.  Surely you can make David's one-line change and try that for
yourself?  I really believe you will get the point very quickly if you
do that.

> Why are you guys being so stubborn and so unwilling to listen to my point
> of view?  What is so wrong with a strong warning instead of a fatal error?

Basically because what you want us to do is the rough equivalent of
adding an option to a car to unlink the gearshift from the brake pedal
so the user can experiment with shifting out of Park without braking.

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