Better tools for kernel developers [LWN.net]

Better tools for kernel developers

Posted Feb 7, 2020 9:35 UTC (Fri) by milesrout (subscriber, #126894) [Link] (5 responses)

I would have thought it would be rather obvious to anyone that has ever USED outlook what is wrong with it: absolutely everything.

In particular, though, your argument seems to be 'Outlook is fine because it has every feature you could possibly need' while also simultaneously claiming that the Linux kernel development process is broken because Outlook doesn't support it properly. That seems to suggest that Outlook doesn't have every feature you could possibly need...

Better tools for kernel developers

Posted Feb 7, 2020 9:41 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (4 responses)

"Everything wrong" is not an answer.

> In particular, though, your argument seems to be 'Outlook is fine because it has every feature you could possibly need'
Nope. I'm saying that Outlook has features that I need (and other average corporate email users), not every feature under the sun. And it seems like it's kernel developers that need some strange behaviors from mail.

Better tools for kernel developers

Posted Feb 7, 2020 9:47 UTC (Fri) by milesrout (subscriber, #126894) [Link] (1 responses)

> "Everything wrong" is not an answer.

I have never identified a design decision in Outlook that I like. I hate the default shortcuts, I hate how the buttons are laid out, I hate how the panes are laid out, I hate how the windows are laid out, I hate their horrible excuse for an implementation of standardised email protocols... everything about it is terrible.

> Nope. I'm saying that Outlook has features that I need (and other average corporate email users), not every feature under the sun. And it seems like it's kernel developers that need some strange behaviors from mail.

The oh-so-strange feature of sending plain text email?

Better tools for kernel developers

Posted Feb 8, 2020 12:46 UTC (Sat) by gfernandes (subscriber, #119910) [Link]

>>The oh-so-strange feature of sending plain text email?

... that works perfectly fine in Outlook?

Sorry, but you've still not addressed the very valid question of what exactly is wrong.

Not usable with the Linux kernel workflow could equally be a problem with the workflow and/or the eccentricities of the mail exchange being mandated?

A PR is trivial in comparison to a patch with no context.

Better tools for kernel developers

Posted Feb 11, 2020 22:51 UTC (Tue) by poruid (guest, #15924) [Link] (1 responses)

This makes me rant.

Besides the usual nonsensical way that options, account setting or any entity are organised in MS Outlook (e.g. navigate from Advanced to Extra to whatever deeper and then end up again in the dialog the navigation started from, ESC deep down a dialog stack just ending the whole stack), its all-functionality-in-one-application is hell bound: load and startup times are terrible, memory usage is huge, etc etc. Having separate tools that do one thing good and work well together - sounds familiar ? - is much better. The balancing of tradeoffs at Microsoft its development process have very little to do with user demands and much more with squeezing out profits and locking customers in.

Better tools for kernel developers

Posted Feb 11, 2020 23:26 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

FWIW, I have a fairly large Outlook mailbox and the Outlook process private memory size is 180Mb. And this includes all the GUI stuff like rich text editor. I don't consider this even remotely problematic...

Better tools for kernel developers

Posted Feb 7, 2020 12:44 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

Outlook is a Microsoft Exchange (as opposed to "email") client, requiring you to go all-in on Microsoft infrastructure on the backend if you're going to use even a fraction of its feature set. It also requires use of non-Free operating systems.

Both of those make Outlook a complete non-starter before we even get to feature sets.

I'm in this for the Four Freedoms, and I put my money where my mouth is.

Better tools for kernel developers

Posted Feb 7, 2020 13:47 UTC (Fri) by tao (subscriber, #17563) [Link]

How about not being able to send patches without mangling them?

Better tools for kernel developers

Posted Feb 7, 2020 20:44 UTC (Fri) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link] (10 responses)

> What exactly is _wrong_ with Outlook?

I've never used Outlook, so this is second hand but it appear to not support any straight forward method to reply separately to various points in an email.

When people using Outlook have found the need to do this when replying to me they sometimes mark their comments in blue. Sometimes put [MYNAME] near them. Sometimes just interleave with my original text so I have to remember what I wrote so I can filter it out.
In short, it hard to have a detailed multi-thread conversation with Outlook.

Now imaging trying to do code review using Outlook - code review often requires multiple separate statements, and often needs each to be clearly tied to a specific line of code.

I'm using gerrit in project at present and once when I was grumbling about it at a conference, someone said they really like it because it allows you to comment on individual lines. I thought "so what, I've been doing that with email for decades". I subsequently discovered they used Outlook. Enough said.

Better tools for kernel developers

Posted Feb 7, 2020 20:53 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (9 responses)

> I've never used Outlook, so this is second hand but it appear to not support any straight forward method to reply separately to various points in an email.
Outlook defaults to top-posting, but it supports traditional point-by-point replies as well. It also has tools to quote and unquote blocks of text. Most people are just not exposed to them.

> Now imaging trying to do code review using Outlook - code review often requires multiple separate statements, and often needs each to be clearly tied to a specific line of code.
Indeed, Outlook is not the best tool for it. Additionally, Outlook defaults to a proportional font which is nicer to read than monospace fonts. But it makes it a poor tool to edit or read code.

Better tools for kernel developers

Posted Feb 7, 2020 22:16 UTC (Fri) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link] (4 responses)

> Outlook defaults to top-posting, but it supports traditional point-by-point replies as well.

I didn't know that - thanks. How easy is it to enable? Are there simple instructions I can point someone to? "Please do *this* whenever you reply to me".. (It would need to work for the web-base outlook as well as the desktop app .... oh, and the phone app and ....)

> Most people are just not exposed to them.

Maybe that simple fact is a big flaw in Outlock. There is little point having functionality that people cannot find and don't even know to look for. I know UI design is hard, but email is so ubiquitous that it really needs the work to be put in.

Thanks.

Better tools for kernel developers

Posted Feb 7, 2020 22:53 UTC (Fri) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] (2 responses)

How easy is it to enable? Are there simple instructions I can point someone to? "Please do *this* whenever you reply to me"

I was able to find these instructions on Microsoft's website, though these are how to set the default rather than how to do it for an individual message.

Maybe that simple fact is a big flaw in Outlock. There is little point having functionality that people cannot find and don't even know to look for.

Older, plain text email clients defaulted to prefixing every line with a quote character because that was the only practical way of quoting a message. When newer clients started to support fancier formatting, that approach didn't work the same, so they used HTML-type quoting. Unfortunately, they don't seem to have come up with an easy way to intersperse quotes and replies, so people defaulted to top posting. That said, even with old-fashioned plain text quoting, there were plenty of people who top posted because it was faster than quote/reply formatting.

Better tools for kernel developers

Posted Feb 8, 2020 0:19 UTC (Sat) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link] (1 responses)

> though these are how to set the default rather than how to do it for an individual message.

Thanks for the link. I was afraid it might only be settable globally. This related directly to my point below...

> That said, even with old-fashioned plain text quoting, there were plenty of people who top posted because it was faster than quote/reply formatting.

That's true and it doesn't bother me at all - providing they manage to communicate clearly.
I really don't care about the format, but I would like people to think about the message that they want to send, and then to create the message accordingly.
This means they need the tools available to create a useful message. Sometimes top-posting is a perfectly good way to send a message, sometimes interleaving is best. In the cases that I can think of that particularly bothered me, my correspondent clearly *was* trying to communicate usefully, but were impeded by their tool.
Having the tools available needs them available on a message-by-message basis, not as a global setting.

Having quote-with-prefix/quote-without-prefix/don't-quote as a global setting is a bit like having reply-to-sender/reply-to-all/forward be a global setting. (or html/plain-text being a global setting!!!)

Better tools for kernel developers

Posted Mar 3, 2020 17:09 UTC (Tue) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link]

If you set it to "prefix each line", the precise behaviour depends on whether the original message is plain text or HTML, so you don't get the > prefixing for HTML emails (instead you get a coloured border on the side, which is inoffensive and actually quite useful). It's not quite as good as if it let you set this per message, but in practice the way it works seems basically sane and actually a fairly reasonable approach.

Also, when replying to a plain text email, it defaults to plain text so you don't need to change anything.

I don't really want to defend Outlook too much since I kind of hate it, mostly for reasons not covered in this thread, but in this particular way I think its reputation is a bit unfair.

Better tools for kernel developers

Posted Feb 8, 2020 1:20 UTC (Sat) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> (It would need to work for the web-base outlook as well as the desktop app .... oh, and the phone app and ....)

The web version of outlook does not support sane quoting. I believe the phone apps are similarly feature-limited.

Better tools for kernel developers

Posted Feb 13, 2020 2:31 UTC (Thu) by chutzpah (subscriber, #39595) [Link] (3 responses)

I have recently had Outlook 365 thrust upon me, configured in such a way that all alternate clients are blocked.

> Outlook defaults to top-posting, but it supports traditional point-by-point replies as well. It also has tools to quote and unquote blocks of text. Most people are just not exposed to them.
I have yet to discover any way to configure it to work this way, at least with the Outlool 365 web client. If you know how to get this functionality, please share.

Better tools for kernel developers

Posted Feb 13, 2020 2:35 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

I don't use the online client, but Googling finds this: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/reply-with-inlin...

Better tools for kernel developers

Posted Feb 13, 2020 2:46 UTC (Thu) by chutzpah (subscriber, #39595) [Link] (1 responses)

Thanks for the pointer, but that is for the desktop client only. Unfortunately the web client does not have any such features that I have managed to discover.

Better tools for kernel developers

Posted Feb 13, 2020 3:10 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

Only Outlook for Windows supports inline quoting. The rest (mac, android, web, etc) don't support it, and Microsoft has never indicated that this will ever change.