dfeustel@mindspring.com wrote:
>
> What kinds of mail standards violations are you referring to above?

Well, I am thinking on two classes of violations:

1. the well-known HTML email messages: email messages should be
plain-text only, some users either send messages in HTML or as
a mix of plain-text and HTML. Even worse, a lot of people send
messages in Word format too. Certainly, reading these emails
using mail(1) is a challenging task. With MH, we have a chance
of filtering them to make the messages readable again... even
if it is an ugly workaround that should not be required.

2. violations in the MIME headers (e.g., some mail user agents
expect a non-standard header when attaching PDF files to email,
these files are managed transparently by mail user agents,
but when attached using, we say, mhbuild, theses files are
usually unrecoverable by some MUAs). This problem is not
specific to mail/uuencode...

I certainly use mail(1) when reading the system reports, however.
I know that the BSDs send readable email when running the
daily/weekly/monthly scripts, sadly people do not care when sending
email to people that is using other operating systems.

jKILLSPAM.schipper@math.uu.nl wrote:
>
> On the other hand, Firefox's time-to-patch is excellent. And when it
> does have bugs, at least they are in places where one might expect them.
> (And not, say, a media format that allows arbitrary code execution
> pretty much as a design feature, if I've understood the issue correctly.)

D'oh! The active desktop again... ;-)

Agreed, patched releases of Firefox are available as soon as a problem
is discovered; and bugs affect the browser only as we would expect.
Firefox can have bugs, but at least it has a good design that maintains
these bugs under control.

>> Bugs can be found on places that are difficult to believe. I suppose
>> that the bug you patched is related with the permissions or owners of
>> files created using that editor. :-)
>
> The bug I patched had to do with modelines being able to specify
> external commands for actions such as diff, I believe.

Indeed, a feature of vi(1), and vim(1), is the ability of the editor
to call external filters. I use these features to format some parts
of my documents. Certainly patching other files is something the
editor should never try.

>> I usually prefer staying at the software provided with the operating
>> system. vim has a lot of nice extensions to vi, indeed, there is some
>> people here, in the Department of Mathematics, using vim and it can be
>> certainly highly customized (e.g., for TeX), but I prefer staying at
>> something that is portable to any computer running Unix (i.e., plain vi).
>> If it means "software written by the BSD development teams" (either
>> FreeBSD, NetBSD or OpenBSD)... excellent! I usually trust on the
>> software maintained by these teams. In any case, I try to minimize
>> the amount of external software added to the system.
>
> Me too, but some additions are just too useful not to make. For
> instance, on a desktop-ish computer, I'll be quite annoyed without mutt,
> vim (for syntax highlighting), tin, ion (if using X - it's the favourite
> du jour), and a capable browser (w3m, dillo, and/or Firefox). Plus some
> readers for various formats (gv, xpdf, antiword, ...), and you've
> already added quite a bit of software.
>
> Add niceties like xplanet and aterm; some occasionally used programs,
> like gimp and nmap; some stuff to toy with, like php (for syntax
> checking, mostly), postgresql-client, and a couple of libraries; and you
> can imagine that I find a default environment a little too spartan.
> Though I can work in it, of course.

:-)

Well, an operating system is a platform to run the software we need!

I agree with you, for me a good TeX distribution, a browser, OpenMOTIF,
and nmh are required components for a workstation. tin is my favourite
mail reader too, I never get accustomed to other mail readers... MetaPost,
for mathematical figures, and xfig are valuable tools too... and for
network simulations, ns.

Cheers,
Igor.

Igor Sobrado wrote:
> jKILLSPAM.schipper@math.uu.nl wrote:
>>
>> On the other hand, Firefox's time-to-patch is excellent. And when it
>> does have bugs, at least they are in places where one might expect them.
>> (And not, say, a media format that allows arbitrary code execution
>> pretty much as a design feature, if I've understood the issue correctly.)
>
> D'oh! The active desktop again... ;-)

Actually, I was referring to http://secunia.com/advisories/18255/ - how
someone can think that putting callbacks in a media format is a good
idea, is beyond me.

>>> I usually prefer staying at the software provided with the operating
>>> system. I usually trust on the software maintained by [the *BSD]
>>> teams. In any case, I try to minimize the amount of external
>>> software added to the system.
>>
>> Me too, but some additions are just too useful not to make. For
>> instance, on a desktop-ish computer, I'll be quite annoyed without mutt,
>> vim (for syntax highlighting), tin, ion (if using X - it's the favourite
>> du jour), and a capable browser (w3m, dillo, and/or Firefox). Plus some
>> readers for various formats (gv, xpdf, antiword, ...), and you've
>> already added quite a bit of software.
>>
>> Add niceties like xplanet and aterm; some occasionally used programs,
>> like gimp and nmap; some stuff to toy with, like php (for syntax
>> checking, mostly), postgresql-client, and a couple of libraries; and you
>> can imagine that I find a default environment a little too spartan.
>> Though I can work in it, of course.
>
> :-)
>
> Well, an operating system is a platform to run the software we need!
>
> I agree with you, for me a good TeX distribution, a browser, OpenMOTIF,
> and nmh are required components for a workstation. tin is my favourite
> mail reader too, I never get accustomed to other mail readers... MetaPost,
> for mathematical figures, and xfig are valuable tools too... and for
> network simulations, ns.

I don't actually mind running SSH into the faculty systems for LaTeX, so
it's not critical to me.

As to mathematics, I should probably invest some time in something like
PARI...

Joachim

jKILLSPAM.schipper@math.uu.nl wrote:
> Actually, I was referring to http://secunia.com/advisories/18255/ - how
> someone can think that putting callbacks in a media format is a good
> idea, is beyond me.

one might also wonder why putting a command that can drop to a shell in
a mail server is a good idea. things were different long ago.