Mail woes (Was: svn commit: r34926 - in trunk/subversion: include/private libsvn_fs_base libsvn_fs_base/bdb libsvn_fs_base/util libsvn_subr tests/libsvn_fs_base tests/libsvn_subr)

[Jack Repenning <jr...@collab.net>]

On Jan 6, 2009, at 5:12 AM, Stefan Sperling wrote:

> Jack, what mail system are you using?

Is that rhetorical? Not clear. For the record ... nothing you've ever  
heard of, it's a recent internal development.

> It's 2009, mail usually should
> just work. I've never seen any email system this broken before.

Well, I think it's still a dead heat between this system and the  
previous one, or at least apples-to-oranges, but the former was such a  
mess that's no consolation. The former system had better user-facing  
behaviors (the sort of stuff we've been discussing here, of late), but  
worse internals (lost messages, miss-indexed stuff, storage costs,  
maintainability, and performance). It was a blend of ezmlm (which  
takes the glory for the goodness of the user stuff) and  
eyebrowse.tigris.org (the web presentation, which wasn't so great but  
wasn't so bad either). The holes were all in the "blending."

The new one attempts to unify mail lists and "discussions" (erst  
"bulletin boards"). It was a good idea, but stumbled over some of the  
worst of organizational self-sabotage: grand dreams, penurious  
planning, staffing shifts, and so forth. The most I can say in the end  
is, I'll take the bulk of the blame for pushing through to some sort  
of conclusion rather than letting it die aborning, because I felt the  
pain of the old system's liabilities. Didn't anticipate quite so much  
"unclear on the concept" outcome in the new one, though, I must admit.

Stick with us. There are quite certainly problems, but we're working  
on them. The core is sound; I still think we'll get through this.


-==-
Jack Repenning
jackrepenning@tigris.org
Domain Administrator
http://www.tigris.org

and

Chief Technology Officer
CollabNet, Inc.
8000 Marina Boulevard, Suite 600
Brisbane, California 94005
office: +1 650.228.2562
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raindance: +1 877.326.2337, x844.7461
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skype: jackrepenning
twitter: http://twitter.com/jrep

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