Distribution quotes of the week

To be clear, you absolutely can still run your own email infrastructure, getting email delivered to you, filtering incoming spam, sending email (with DMARC signatures and other modern email practices), providing IMAP access, and even run your own webmail setup. You can even do this with all open source software. But the email environment you get this way is increasingly what I called an artisanal one. It's cute, decent enough, and hand-crafted, but it doesn't measure up in usability, features, and performance to the email infrastructure that is run by big providers.

Sometimes the Unix community suffers from the twin attitudes of a) believing if it can't be done perfectly, any improvement shouldn't be attempted at all and b) it's already done as well as is possible anyway.

I disagree with both of these positions, obviously, but have given up pushing against them.

We're in the 6th decade of Unix and we still suffer from unintended, fixable consequences of decisions made long long ago.

I believe if you are maintainer of an important package with many reverse dependencies, you should spend more time to avoid breakage because you have a huge lever effect. For instance, if you can cut corners to save 10 hours of work, but 100 other DDs [Debian Developers] will need to spend 30 minutes each to fix the breakage as a result, it is still a bad tradeoff.

OTOH, as a maintainer of an unpopular leaf package, I can get away with atrocious uploads because nobody but me will notice or care.