PLEASE use MIME Atttachments! (was: Re: [FIX] Comments for Set...)

goran.hultgren at bluefish.se goran.hultgren at bluefish.se
Mon Apr 29 11:44:33 UTC 2002


"Richard A. O'Keefe" <ok at cs.otago.ac.nz> wrote:
> goran.hultgren at bluefish.se wrote:
> 	And if you have made a contribution to Squeak, then you have Celeste
> 	etc. And then you should be able to send a mail to the list using that.
> 
> Yes, I tried that, and as I said, IT DIDN'T WORK.

I know that - I did read your postings, I just tried to help you figure
out why. :-)

> Now I am reasonably used to
>  - Squeak not working (but it does tend to leave behind helpful logs)
>  - mail systems not working (but I invariably get *some* kind of response
>    from the mail daemon to tell me something went wrong).
> "mail to list" failed to work and did not say why.

Sounds bad indeed. But perhaps it succeeded? (as you yourself note
below)

> Looking at the code, I see that "mail to list" sends the message
> to "squeak at cs.uiuc.edu".  I note that the originating address for

Eh. Where did you look? I just looked in my 3.2g image and I ended up
in:

ChangeSet>>buildMessageForMailOutWithUser:

...and as far back as 9/27/2001 (#4385) it seems to be correct. Mind
though I might be looking in the wrong place. The address is in my
image: squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org

What update-level is your image?

> messages in this list used to be
> 
>     squeak-request at cs.uiuc.edu
> 
> and is now
> 
>     squeak-dev-admin at lists.squeakfoundation.org

Well, I thought it was "squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org".

> Could it be that "squeak at cs.uiuc.edu" is no longer a valid address?

Sure could! In that case I guess that Squeak fired it away alright but
you didn't get to see the bounce(?) 

> 	Sure, you have some problem apparently so that it doesn't work but the
> 	only thing you really need (to be able to do that AFAICT) is an SMTP
> 	server. And you have specified your SMTP server, right? (just checking)
> 	
> Ear sick horse.  Mail sent from Netscape worked fine.

What does "Ear sick horse" mean? I am not native english speaking so I
didn't get that.

> Let's kill this thread.  I now have a copy of mpack and from today I shall
> be using it to send my little contributions.  Is it part of the
> 'community standard' that the attachment must be gzipped?

Well, I thought so. Read relevant pages at minnow for more "agreed
stuff" in this area - there are actually quite a few things there that
we have agreed on (like tags etc) - or so I thought anyway... ;-)

> 	> Would it help if I provide a UUdecoder written in Squeak?
> 	
> 	> (But no, I don't suppose _that_ will be accepted unless it's sent as
> 	> an attachment.)
> 	
> 	I guess that you implied a smiley there. ;-)
> 	
> Is there such a thing as a groanie?
> 
> 	And in another posting you wrote:
> 	> 	Fine. However, for distributing Squeak changesets we agreed on MIME 
> 	> 	attachments. It would be nice if you accepted this.
> 	> 	
> 	> Who's this "we"?  _I_ never agreed to it.
> 	
> 	Well, we have been doing it this way for a long time, there is a
> 	toolchain setup that depends on it, it is documented on the Swiki etc.
> 	It is fair to say that the community has "agreed" to do it this way. But
> 	of course - we didn't specifically ask you about it... :-o
> 	
> I deny that it is fair to say that the community has agreed at all.
> Unless 'the community' means just the individuals who _were_ consulted,

I would guess that the issue was debated on the list - as everything
else.
And if you weren't on the list at the time, then you are correct - you
were not in "the community" then. I don't know this for sure though, I
don't remember and don't have time to dig it up.

> in which case Squeak user and Squeak promoter though I may be, I am not
> part of the Squeak community.
> 	
> Had I had any part in the decision, I would have argued as strongly as
> I could against attachments, on the grounds that
>  - they are not necessary,
>  - they are not supported by all mail user agents,
>  - they are notorious for insecurity.

Just curious, how is uuencoding better than attachments then? It's not
supported in all email clients AFAIK.

So you want us to change this?

Honestly, and with all due respect etc. etc and I don't want to sound
rude and so on, BUT... this thread feels so unnecessary. AFAIK nobody
else have argued against the current scheme in all this time - you are
the first. And there are lots of people submitting stuff to the list.

> But then, I'm the kind of troglodyte for prefers plain text messages
> to Microsoft Word attachments...

Well, I am too.

> I am of course perfectly willing to use whatever method *works*.

Well, you could have fooled me.

regards, Göran



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