Re: OT: Roland Puntaier / "getmail6" drama

On 10/28/21 12:46 PM, Stefan Krah wrote:
> This is how productive people are exploited all over the world. The work
> horse has done his duty, now a politburo of pigs decides what is good for
> the "community". Literally Animal Farm.
>
> What software have you written? Where are your repositories?
>
>
> Stefan Krah

It boggles my mind that there are people digging their heels in over 
this; Charles has made one simple request--well, more than one, but 
let's focus--please change the name of the forked copy, and here we have 
people digging their heels in and saying, essentially "No; I don't wanna."

As Charles pointed out, and indeed I've been guilty of this very thing, 
when people have problems with getmail6, they simply go searching for 
"getmail"; they assume, as I have on other projects, that the "6" simply 
means "This is a new version released by the same person/team." That's 
just how human minds work; optimizing away what seems to be irrelevant 
minutiae. Brains are lazy; they have to be. How many times have you 
missed "the the" in a sentence? Trust me; that's happened. Even if you 
haven't noticed it.

It's in a different repository? So what. Maybe he just decided to make a 
clean break and host v6 on GitHub. I don't know, and unless I see 
something that clearly shows otherwise, even I'm not going to assume 
it's a whole new maintainer. And that assumes I even bother checking, 
which I probably won't *until* I have problems. And I consider myself an 
expert user.

With a noticeably different name; eg "getmail-ng", "getmail-py3" or any 
of a host of others I've seen offered here--that might have been enough 
to jar me out of routine complacency, and recognize "Hey, this might not 
be the same person/team." Something to jog my otherwise lazy brain. And 
certainly something that would be less likely to be pulled in 
incorrectly by automated workflows, say one set up by a Debian package 
maintainer who has dozens or even hundreds of packages they're 
responsible for.

Note, I haven't had this specific problem; frankly, I stopped using 
getmail years ago because I set up a workflow where I no longer needed 
it, but I've enjoyed reading the conversations over the years, so have 
remained subscribed.

I have no doubt that if/when Charles ever releases a Python3 version, it 
will only be once it meets the same high standards he has so clearly 
shown for the current releases, and the ones I've used directly.

Thank you, Charles, for such an incredible and useful tool; I found it 
valuable when I needed it, and will happily return if I need to.