bogus bogotuning

[Jason A. Smith]

I suggest you re-read Joerg's email again to re-familiarize yourself
with the basic philosophy held by almost everyone in the open-source and
Linux communities, which is FREEDOM!  Why do you stubbornly insist on
imprisoning users in walls like most MS software does?  You imply that
you normally agree with this philosophy, but your actions show that
obviously you don't!

On Wed, 2004-01-28 at 08:46, Greg Louis wrote:
> On 20040128 (Wed) at 1424:41 +0100, Joerg Over Dexia wrote:
> > That's the Un*x way, I'd believe.
> 
> I'm normally on your side about letting users shoot themselves in the
> foot, but even Un*x only does that if there's a benefit to be had for
> someone.

How many times do I have to say this, the benefit is simply letting
users experiment with bogotune while they are waiting for their corpus
to accumulate more messages.  Let me waste my CPU cycles if I feel like
it!  I would at least like to try the command, even if I know its output
will be useless.  I despise being confined by software and being treated
like a child who is told they are not allowed to do what they want to
do.  If I felt more comfortable with the child-like hand holding I would
use MS.

> > This actually sounds like the "we know what's good for you"
> > attitude which drives MS users up the wall....
> 
> Yeah, I've worried about my stance being somewhat arrogant, but
> honestly, I think we do more users better service by not coding options
> that permit invalid runs.  Anyone who wants to take the responsibility
> on herself can convert the code to warn but not exit; as you point
> out, it's not hard.  I just think it's bogus to offer it officially.

I find it very arrogant.  Let the users decide for themselves what is
best for them.  It is better to give them the freedom to do what they
like, then you can warn them based on your knowledge and experience that
the results will most likely be crap.  I am not trying to argue with you
technically, but I would like to experiment myself, just as you have
done.  I would like to be able to do this without wasting my time
patching and recompiling every time I install a new version.

> Unfortunately it also implies that there might be some use in having
> such an option -- which I do not believe is the case, and am unwilling
> to be seen as supporting in any way.

A warning included with the output would obviously say otherwise.  I
don't see the logical connection you are making that having an option
available somehow blesses its output as absolute truth.  That is what
the warning if for.

Again, this would simply be turning a fatal error and annoying "slap
on the hand" message telling the user they are not allowed to use
the command into a warning and letting the user use the command at 
their own risk.  Where is the harm?  It is not nearly as dangerous
as disabling the breaks on a car, I don't understand where that
analogy comes from.

~Jason
-- 
Jason A. Smith <jazbo at jazbo.dyndns.org>