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[Nmh-workers] edginess

2011-12-26 12:13:28
gentlepeople, i've been on the nmh-workers list for a couple of months
now, watching the way things work, who does what, who feels how, that
kind of thing. i've digested enough culture now that i feel like i can
speak in non-ignorance.

let's stop walking on egg shells with this code base. there's no need to
discuss whether to keep using vfork, just note in passing, the last
system on which fork was so slow that an mh user would notice it, was
Eunice. that was 1987. we don't need a separate branch for removing vmh
or ridding ourselves of #ifdef's or removing posix replacement functions
or depending on pure ansi/posix "libc".

these things should each be a day or two of work and the "main branch"
should just be modern. let 1.4 be the last release before the mh team
got "edgy". let's push forward, aggressively.

the time we spend discussing these things and working on separate
branches and then carefully merging those branches in, comes out of our
development budget. none of this work is controversial.

it should not be necessary for folks like markus schnalke to fork nmh in
order to modernize it. let's be bold, so that others who want to be
bold, can move with us, forward into a bold future.

mh's user base is small, and if any of them are running something older
than linux 2.2 or freebsd 3.1 or mac/os 10.1 then we can safely tell
them, look here, we have to escape the bonds of gravity, please run an
operating system and compiler released no earlier than 1999, we're
moving mh to its next century.

happy localize(winter_holiday), all.

paul

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