On 20200713 20:10:36, Kevin A. McGrail wrote:
+pmcSo you are saying that to save somebody a passing bad feeling you are throwing people under the bus who would have to edit scripts and pray. What is the difference if it happens today or a year from now? What Good Engineering Reason Is Served By This Pain?Joanne, I have no interest in debating you on this topic. I never said it was being done for engineering reasons. The change is being done to remove racially-charged language from Apache SpamAssassin. As an open source project, we are part of a movement built on a foundation of inclusion that has changed how computing is done. The engineering concerns are outweighed by the social benefits and your huffing is not going to stop it. The technical lift for a user will be an SQL query / perl one-liners to search and replace your conf for things like whitelist_to to welcomelist_to. I'm sure the dev/user mailing list can come up with some examples we can add to the UPGRADE file. And if there are projects that build on SA, they a year plus of warning to implement the coming changes. If you know of any programs/scripts that need help, point them here or the dev list. Regards, KAM
user_prefs - every one will have to be edited to change names eventually. People will bitch when they have to edit their files. They will bitch of "root" goes in and edits the file for them (quite justifiably). Likely as not rules files will have to be repaired.
Engineering that is politically driven tends to be long term disasters. I've been around long enough to have seen it in action. Of course, that makes me an old irrelevant fossil. So you get to discover the same mistakes I discovered rather than benefit from inherited experience.
How does this move improve the technical quality of the product from the end users' perspective? It's a nightmare for sysadmins, "Do I save the customer the effort and modify HIS files or do I tell the customer she has to edit the arcane files?" One way he is damned for invading privacy. The other way he is ROUNDLY damned for making customer lives hardware. The change is not a long term win for anybody but those imagining "blacklist" and "whitelist" are racially related. Can't somebody just suggest they grow up? Or is that too good a technical quality solution?
{^_^}
