Re: OT: Roland Puntaier / "getmail6" drama

Dear Bob,
Dear Charles,
Dear Roland,

>> He also claims I am using "aggressive language"...
> 
> Your comportment over the years on this list belies the poor fellow's observations. You present in this venue as a serious person with no evident agendas beyond the health of your software. Many of our younger folk quickly become frightened when a serious person appears.


I’m sorry, but as a long time “lurker” on this list, I have to chime in at this point to strongly disagree with this statement. 
If you examine the past postings on this list, Charles has been consistently rude to the people posting here (more charitable people might call it grumpy). It’s the typical attitude of a developer who thinks he is smarter than everyone else, I’ve seen it time and time again. And even if you are smarter than everyone else, its no excuse to be rude to people.

As such, I think I understand Roland’s frustration at communicating with Charles (although of course that’s also not an excuse for insults).

Roland is perfectly right to criticize Charles development methods, for a popular open source project messing around with patches sent by email is far from current best practices, and creates much unnecessary work for contributors. If you want to provide open source software to the community, there is really no excuse these days not to be on GitHub/Bitbucket/Sourceforge etc… if you’ve been doing things the same way in IT for 23 years, its a sure sign you are no longer doing it right.

I think we should be thanking Roland for bringing getmail, a software used by many individuals and organizations, into the 21st century. He solved a real problem, and made sure getmail continued to be available to its users in current linux distributions. Doing so is also a security benefit, since people don’t have to run old, insecure software stacks just to stay getmail5 compatible. 

Had Charles been easier to work with, I am sure Roland would have managed this in a more cooperative way, but given the way things are, we should thank him for taking on this effort, and not bash him for it.

Such is the nature of open source: if the original developers aren’t servicing the community, someone else can step up, and this is what Roland did. 
Perhaps after 23 years it is time tor Charles to retire, and hand the getmail torch on to those who want to make it work well with current systems/distros. In this way, he would also not be bothered by the support requests any more.

I realize this is probably not a popular opinion on this list, but I felt someone should speak up to defend (and thank!) Roland as well.

Regards from Cabo Verde,

Richard