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Betterbird: a fine-tuned version of Mozilla Thunderbird

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Re: Betterbird: a fine-tuned version of Mozilla Thunderbird

#91

Post by WastingMyTime89 »

rjzzleep wrote: post #56
WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did something like that happen with ffmpeg a few years back? A huge amount of the dev work was being done by one at-the-time abrasive guy. They booted him, he forked, the ffmpeg mainline went moribund while the fork line kept getting better. No, that’s not what happened with ffmpeg. Multiple developers forked ffmpeg in a somewhat abrasive way because they disagreed with the rest of the team. They wanted to focus on…

I mean it kinda depends on who you consider the abrasive guy. In my experience just like with linux a lot of the ffmpeg/mplayer folks were abrasive. Sometimes it bothers me sometimes is doesn't. Michael Niedermayer was the maintainer and a guy who did crazy amounts of work on ffmpeg. But he was also what seemed to be the BDFL. I'm not entirely sure what happened, but it seems like there was sort of a coup that took o…

> Then the Michael Niedermayer side took back control and the group that took over ffmpeg abdicated power over ffmpeg and its brand and moved to a fork.

Once again, no, it’s not what happened. A team forked but failed to gain significant traction and the original project is now the only one remaining.

The email you quote comes from just before the fork. Niedermayer was the main maintainer of ffmpeg and as stated there was disagreement between him and what became the libav developers about the possibility of adding new features while improving the code.

The libav team wanted to fully focus on code improvement and left in a very vocal and really obnoxious way. As anyone could have predicted history showed the they were wrong. It was completely possible to do both new features and code improvement at the same time.

Niedermayer resigned in 2015 because the way the fork was handled had made things painful for him which I fully respect.

Re: Betterbird: a fine-tuned version of Mozilla Thunderbird

#92

Post by p4bl0 »

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #81
rtpg wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would you propose as an alternative to people who just… constantly fill mailing lists with attacks on people or the like? Reasonable people don’t need to have such harsh actions applied of course. But reasonable people don’t end up getting to this point! I am a bit partial to messaging when someone is banned like this, but there are definitely cases where people will just keep on arguing about something forever…

> What would you propose as an alternative to people who just… constantly fill mailing lists with attacks on people or the like? ignore them on the client side. it's easy. there's a field called FROM. Someone else might be interested in reading what these people have to say. Who knows. > Reasonable people don’t need to have such harsh actions applied of course Define reasonable in a global way. I think maybe you were…

> ignore them on the client side. it's easy. there's a field called FROM.

Do you realize that your discourse politically implies a very individualistic views of how such problems should be dealt with?

I don't know the situation here, but let's take it aside and consider another example: some one in an organization is constantly harassing other members (e.g., a guy being heavy with women). If the organization follows what you suggest, it means it doesn't deal with the problem has a collective, and rather let everyone deal with it on their own. You're telling the victims of the bully that they're all alone, you don't consider them. This is probably the best way to have them leave and be left with the bullies only in the end.

I truly believe this cannot be the right approach to such behavioral issues. Rather, the collective approach at the organization level is the good one: it sends the right message to everyone, both the bully (now you stop), the potential bullies (we don't tolerate such behaviors here), the victims (we heard you, we're stand together, our organization culture is based on respect and you count as much as everyone else), and the potential victims (we do out best to make our organization a safe place).

You have nothing to fear in this if you don't want to be on the bully side.

Re: Betterbird: a fine-tuned version of Mozilla Thunderbird

#94

Post by FeepingCreature »

p4bl0 wrote: post #92
peoplefromibiza wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What would you propose as an alternative to people who just… constantly fill mailing lists with attacks on people or the like? ignore them on the client side. it's easy. there's a field called FROM. Someone else might be interested in reading what these people have to say. Who knows. > Reasonable people don’t need to have such harsh actions applied of course Define reasonable in a global way. I think maybe you were…

> ignore them on the client side. it's easy. there's a field called FROM. Do you realize that your discourse politically implies a very individualistic views of how such problems should be dealt with? I don't know the situation here, but let's take it aside and consider another example: some one in an organization is constantly harassing other members (e.g., a guy being heavy with women). If the organization follows…

They could just inform the police. They could even help victims to inform the police. The problem with the "collective" approach is that it often creates unaccountable positions of authority. Guess where bullies will gather?

I ain't ever seen a vote to ban on a ML.

Re: Betterbird: a fine-tuned version of Mozilla Thunderbird

#95

Post by fuzzy2 »

kayson wrote: post #5

I really love Thunderbird; I've been using it for at least a decade now. There are definitely places where it still needs improvement, after years and years. While Betterbird seems exciting in theory, the attitude of the project leader (who it seems is a banned former contributor to Mozilla Thunderbird), and honestly even the arrogance in the name itself gives me pause. The issues laid out in this[0] email thread are…

I’d just like to address one part, the name. I do not think it is arrogant at all. Instead, I feel it’s just… lazy.

In the past, I also created userscripts for various websites. I eventually created collections called Better$Sitename, e.g. BetterHackerNews. Because, why not? The userscript (or in this case, Thunderbird fork) is certainly supposed to be an improvement. As such, BetterSomething is a very appropriate, if lazy, name. You wouldn’t create Worsebird on purpose, right? ;-)

Re: Betterbird: a fine-tuned version of Mozilla Thunderbird

#96

Post by hadrien01 »

I don't really care about the debates about the founder in the comments. I use Betterbird for Gmail and Yahoo Mail, and it works pretty well. I use it mostly for the multi-line view in the inbox and the search terms. The rest is just classic Thunderbird: a mediocre email client, but the only FOSS one that work on Windows and has tabs.

Re: Betterbird: a fine-tuned version of Mozilla Thunderbird

#97

Post by rjzzleep »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #91
rjzzleep wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean it kinda depends on who you consider the abrasive guy. In my experience just like with linux a lot of the ffmpeg/mplayer folks were abrasive. Sometimes it bothers me sometimes is doesn't. Michael Niedermayer was the maintainer and a guy who did crazy amounts of work on ffmpeg. But he was also what seemed to be the BDFL. I'm not entirely sure what happened, but it seems like there was sort of a coup that took o…

> Then the Michael Niedermayer side took back control and the group that took over ffmpeg abdicated power over ffmpeg and its brand and moved to a fork. Once again, no, it’s not what happened. A team forked but failed to gain significant traction and the original project is now the only one remaining. The email you quote comes from just before the fork. Niedermayer was the main maintainer of ffmpeg and as stated ther…

You can say no it's not what happened happened all you want. But here's the announcement from the libav side[1]. It was definitely not a friendly fork. There was clearly a dispute and the Niedermayer side won[2], which led to the fork. But either way Niedermayer was basically BDFL since he took over from Fabrice Bellard until he resigned. That is ultimately one of the things that led to the dispute. Much like what happened between vim and neovim. Although the disagreements between Bram and the neovim team were a lot more friendly.

I'm not sure which part you disagree with, since you clearly seem to be saying the same thing with respect to who forked what.

And one of the big fundamental differences between ffmpeg/libav and thunderbird/betterbird is that the Niedermayer side still merged in a lot of changes from libav, leading to an overall better product than libav, whereas thunderbird does not at all follow the same behaviour WRT betterbird. They have ridiculous bugs that had for decades and as much as I try to like it I can't for the life of me for example understand how they have an open request for a search that doesn't end up in that stupid filter view instead of just showing all results.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20161107163133/http://article.gm...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20120510045810/http://lists.mpla...

Re: Betterbird: a fine-tuned version of Mozilla Thunderbird

#98

Post by peoplefromibiza »

p4bl0 wrote: post #92
peoplefromibiza wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What would you propose as an alternative to people who just… constantly fill mailing lists with attacks on people or the like? ignore them on the client side. it's easy. there's a field called FROM. Someone else might be interested in reading what these people have to say. Who knows. > Reasonable people don’t need to have such harsh actions applied of course Define reasonable in a global way. I think maybe you were…

> ignore them on the client side. it's easy. there's a field called FROM. Do you realize that your discourse politically implies a very individualistic views of how such problems should be dealt with? I don't know the situation here, but let's take it aside and consider another example: some one in an organization is constantly harassing other members (e.g., a guy being heavy with women). If the organization follows…

No post body was provided.

Re: Betterbird: a fine-tuned version of Mozilla Thunderbird

#99

Post by Semaphor »

prox wrote: post #59
pndy wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> honestly even the arrogance in the name itself gives me pause I don't see arrogance in the name, it's just bit cheesy and unappealing. But I guess it's hard to come with something both catchy and at the same telling it's Thunderbird beneath but with enhancements. Postbox which is also based on Thunderbird and comes with additional features, started as freeware in beta. After the stable release a 30-day trial was in…

When Thunderbird closed shop, I went with Postbox, still do. I just need a client that works, and it has served me well.

I decided to check them out again, as I couldn’t even remember what my issues with them were when they were new.

Well, now I can say: So slow. It made me think it might be electron, but apparently it’s based on thunderbird, so I guess TB is also slow, or they are doing something wrong.

Re: Betterbird: a fine-tuned version of Mozilla Thunderbird

#100

Post by FeepingCreature »

esperent wrote: post #90
FeepingCreature wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The email reprinted in that PDF makes me irrationally angry to read. I hope there's an ebuild for Betterbird soon, because after reading that I'm not sure I want anything to do with Thunderbird anymore. Quote: > * No interaction with any of the people involved. This includes > o No interactions with Thunderbird community members, paid contributors, and Thunderbird Council members. > o No interactions in any official…

I was in the unfortunate position of having to ban someone from an online tech support forum of which I was the mod. This was after weeks of myself and other mods trying to resolve the issues with them. Issues like name calling, trying to stir up racial issues, making fun of new users for being noobs, trying to stir up other users against the mods, all that teenage BS (although the person was in their 20s or 30s). Th…

I'm sorry to hear that. I fully believe in people's right to cut off contact, even across platforms. It's more that in this case this power seems to have been centralized by the project, whereas I believe it should rest only with the individual - cutting off contact for another member, using community participation as a threat to enforce it, is what raises my hackles.
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