[sf-lug] (forw) Re: How to check distro checksums and signatures

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Bobbie Sellers (bliss-sf4ever at dslextreme.com):

> Sorry about all the errors in directing the mail this evening.

No worries!  (My favourite Aussie expression.)  I was just trying to
help.


> Mozilla wants to be shut of Thunderbird.

Yeah, I was shocked to hear that.  It's sad.  

Sounds like it's really a funding problem.  Firefox is underwritten by
adverising and its intermediaries (such as Google, Inc.), while
Thunderbird appears to be underwritten solely from within Mozilla
Foundation.

> Maybe that is why they are changing things to which the long time
> users are accustomed.

Well, my guess about 'Smart Reply' is that it's an attempt to do a
creative workaround to an age-old problem:  (Many) users are
slow/reluctant/unable to deal with the Internet reality of there always
having been two[1] different reply modes, in e-mail:

o  Reply-All 
o  Reply-Sender (which in software usually bears the label 'Reply')

Every e-mail program since time immemorial[2] has had separate commands
for those reply modes.

_And yet_ a large percentage of Internet users are unable to deal with
this situation.  They refuse to recognise anything but 'Reply', and they 
want 'Reply' to magically Do the Right Thing in all circumstances.  This
lead to a noxious multi-decade-long Internet debate that was already
infamous in the 1980s, where the novice users demanded changes to the
functioning of Internet forums, mostly mailing lists, to make 'Reply' 
Do the Right Thing automagically.

The most noxious part of that debate concerned the demand that mailing
lists force ('munge') an SMTP header called Reply-To, to make 'Reply'
(i.e., reply-sender) forcibly go to public, i.e., to do what reply-all mode 
is for.  On the many mailing lists whose admins implement this bad idea,
reply-sender mode _breaks_, with the result of periodically embarrassing
public broadcast of very private mail intended to go off-list.

IETF settled the debate in 2001 via RFCs 2822 and 2369:  As technical
users had long asserted, they confirmed that the above is not what
Reply-To is _for_.
(http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/netiquette.html#replyto)  Therefore, a
mailing list forcing it is not only ignoring the separate functional
roles of the two reply modes and misleading posters into sending
embarrassing private communications to the public, but also sabotaging
users' deployment of that header for its legitimate purpose.

That IETF standards pronouncement was _definitive_ -- but universally
ignored by the Reply Should Do the Right Thing ('RSDtRT') brigade.
Fifteen years further on, nothing's changed.

My surmise is that Smart Reply is a noble technical effort to give the
RSDtRT brigade what they want and _make it actually work_.  The Mozilla
people probably figured 47 years of e-mail and an IETF clarification
didn't educate RSDtRT people about reply modes, so it's time to try
making software smarter rather than users.  They say:

  Q:  E-mail works fine but today I need to reply to all the addressees
  from a message I received but the option "Reply to all" is not visible
  anymore in the header.  In its place there is the new "Archive" button.
  So I went into Customize to remove "Archive" and put "Reply to all" in
  its place, but that option is not there !

  A:  When in the customize window you are looking for a Smart Reply
  button.  This button knows to Reply when there is only one person on
  the email and Reply to All when there are more than one.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1040019

I have no idea whether it works as well as they hope.  But I wish you
good luck with it (or, if it doesn't work for you, perhaps you should
try turning said feature off).

>  Lucky you.  I checked that Superuser site and it had nothing
>  useful.

Ja, well, it was just a search result that seemed to cast light on the
situation.  You might find ones that are more useful by Web-searching
some more.

> It reads that I deplore the trend in Thunderbird to deprecate Text
> only buttons and that the meaningless icon is placed far from the
> rest of the control panel.

Yep.  That was one thing I always fixed in the app preferences right
away.  (I used Thunderbird at work for six years, until just recently.
Although, strictly speaking...:)

> If Mageia supported Icedove I would use it.

Now that you mention it, that was actually Debian's Icedove I used for
work e-mail, as it was my Debian workstation.  Pretty good, I thought.
My vague impression was that Icedove is extremely close to upstream
Thunderbird, though, the difference being almost entirely the branding
elements (name and graphics).


[1] Some commenters urged a distinct third mode, Reply-List, which
seemed a little crazed.  My favourite MUA, mutt, has an 'L'
list-reply command that does a tailored reply-all to strip non-list
correspondents from the reply set.  But that's really a special
subvariant of reply-all, and MUAs seem to mostly be moving to make
reply-list more context-aware in whom to include.

[2] Participants in the cited noxious Internet debate used to cite one
or two obscure Unix mail programs lacking a reply-all command, as
supposedly justifying a demand that 'Reply' magically Do the Right Thing 
everywhere.  Those programs have fallen out of use in the decades since.
(I think 'elm' might have been one at some point?'