Subj : Re: MMTerm?
To   : Ed Williams
From : William McBrine
Date : Sun Mar 11 2001 11:53 pm

-=> Ed Williams wrote to William McBrine <=-

 EW> Terribly sorry, that's what I took from what's going on.  When your
 EW> web site mysteriously changed to the place here,

Um, what was mysterious about it? It's been at SourceForge since last June.  
I talked about it at length before the transfer, announced it in all the
usual places, and even kept the old site up, pointing to the new one, for a
few months afterwards.

 EW> BlueMail came in, reporting to be a new qwk reader based on MultiMail 

BlueMail actually dates to 1998, IIRC. He put out version 0.1 then, and
stopped. The recent versions 0.2 through 0.4 were just the first since
then. Also, it's been about three months since BlueMail 0.4, and MultiMail
0.38 is more recent.

So, where are you reading about BlueMail, and not MultiMail? I honestly
don't understand this.

 EW> I've checked and apparently it's just someone taking up the GNU Open
 EW> licensing option, and making sure to credit everyone.  I mistook it as
 EW> a series of events indicating you'd given the reigns to someone else.

If I ever do pass on MultiMail to a new maintainer, you can be sure it
won't be Ingo Brueckl. I kind of have mixed feelings about him... On the
one hand, he _has_ shown more interest in the MultiMail code than any other
programmer besides me and the previous maintainers. On the other hand, he's
really not that good. His BlueMail 0.4 still has the same egregious bugs as
0.1 (not present in the version of MultiMail from which it was derived,
BTW, nor in any other version); the most prominent of these prevents it
from working at all with Blue Wave packets, unless they've already been
opened by the Blue Wave reader or another reader (like MultiMail) that
generates the .XTI file.

Part of the reason such a serious bug could elude him is that he's not
really interested in using BlueMail as his primary or only reader (as I use
MultiMail) -- he still uses the Blue Wave reader. This is one of the
reasons he forked the code: He wanted to make MultiMail work more like Blue
Wave, whereas I just wanted to make it do the right thing (as I saw it),
and had no interest in making a clone.

A bigger reason was that I refused to accept his patches without
documentation, and he couldn't be bothered to do it. He also made lots of
gratuitous changes, didn't adhere to the existing coding style, and just
generally wrote sloppy, bloated code. Despite all this, he was very
arrogant and sure of his way of doing things. BlueMail is the result.

Not that it's completely without merit. When he sprung 0.1 on the world, it
had all sorts of changes that he'd never mentioned to me, many of which
were actually useful and which I adopted or imitated. It also had many ill-
concieved changes; some of the comments in his terse history file showed
that he misinterpreted the way the original program worked on a number of
points.

I never expected to see another version of BlueMail after 0.1, since it had
been so long. When I took much longer than usual to go from MultiMail 0.37
to 0.38, I figure he either assumed (like you) that I was giving up on it,
or else he took the opportunity of a stable code tree to pull some of the
MultiMail changes into his own code. BlueMail 0.1 was based on MultiMail
0.17, with some features of 0.18. The recent versions of BlueMail do copy
recent MultiMail in some respects, though the core hasn't changed much. It 
remains far behind where MultiMail is now, not even counting the bugs.

He did add a few new tricks of his own, as well. BlueMail 0.4 preserves the
original timestamp of packets, which I imitated in MultiMail 0.38, and even
has one very important feature that I haven't adopted yet: It displays the
number of messages, total and unread, in each packet in the packet window.  
I'm not sure yet if I want to do that in MultiMail, but it's the one thing
right now for which I can imagine someone choosing BlueMail over MultiMail.

 EW> Hell, today I'm lucky to find someone who doesn't tell me "I can't use
 EW> a regular modem, I have DSL!"

I have DSL, but I can still use a regular modem on the same line. It does
seem to interfere with v.90, though; I can only get to about 26400 bps with
the POTS modem while the DSL modem is on.

.... Complex problems have simple, easy to understand wrong answers.
--- MultiMail/Linux v0.39
 * Origin: COMM Port OS/2 juge.com 204.89.247.1 (281) 980-9671 (1:106/2000)

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