the use of unix.wizards

[Clive Steward]

in article <14548 at sun.uucp>, guy at gorodish.UUCP says:
... partial requote 

> The point raised by several people in the discussion was that it was
> *N*O*T* just "shortsightedness in UNIX utility design" that made it
> difficult to withdraw mail.

Guy, you're one of the people who generally writes respectfully and 
respectably here.  But please don't quote out of context.  The
sentence following the one about shortsightedness expresses exactly
that it's kind of difficult to anticipate what people are going to
want in an indefinite future.  That's the point.  We have to keep 
making Unix better.


>   ...  At our site, a large number of users
> have their own machines, which means the "unmail" command would have
> to work over the network; you can't make this secure without a secure
> way of determining whether a request coming from over the network has
> been authorized by the person it purports to come from, and this is
> non-trivial.

But a fairly trivial-to-implement suggestion was made for this, in my 
previous, referenced article.  Right or wrong.  Maybe they arrived out 
of order at your site?

> 
> The analogies used to claim that this was "natural, rational, and
> convenient" also were flawed; you can't say "well, I can do this with
> the US mail" because you can't, in general.
> 

I don't know why 'naturalness' should be interpreted to apply to postal
service mail.  We don't have undo on our pens, but we sure like it on 
editors.  The reason is obvious -- a quick, wrong or reflexive keystroke 
can bring disaster without obvious recourse.  So we make a way to back out.

> And, finally, the "unmail" command would only work if the mail
> message was still sitting unread in the recipient's mailbox.  It's
> *not* the best solution to the problem - the best solution to the
> problem would be to delay the submission of the message to the mail
> delivery system (either by queueing it, or not sending it in the
> first place) until you're sure you want it to go out.  (I don't think
> 

Again, let's look at the paradigm of netnews.  Cancel does get used;
it's the human interface issue again of making disasters easy.  No
walk to the postbox to have second thoughts.

> The point is that not all ideas are created equal; many of them are
> to a greater or lesser degree bogus.  If people don't like having
> bogosity pointed out to them, that's their problem.  A definite aid
> to useful creativity is to weed out bogus ideas early, so you can
> spend time on the good ideas.

Not so much disagreement here; it's the manner, not the opinions
themselves, that irks me.  And this communication, by manner, is far
more powerful in any human interaction than what we choose to call
objective facts.  Said kindly, an insight can lead to newer, better
ideas.  As a remonstration, it serves (as I believe is its emotionally 
intended purpose), to shut up the source of irritation that any 
non-standard thought is.


Thanks for your opinions, by the way, and I do mean it.


Clive