8 ms·

The context here is that someone new randomly showed up on the xorg-devel mailing list, and started asking a ton of questions about the codebase, which has lead

The context here is that someone new randomly showed up on the xorg-devel mailing list, and started asking a ton of questions about the codebase, which has lead to a couple of cleanups. I wouldn't read too much into it. https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-devel/2024-February/thread.html https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-devel/2024-February/thread...

jcranmer 3y ago
I was going to say the name was somehow familiar. Then I went searching through the Mozilla bug tracker and found this comment: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=58308#c90 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=58308#c90.
- bravura 3y ago
  I understand your frustration with the heady enthusiasm of the poster but: Isn’t it true that Thunderbird sixteen years later still lacks complete and first-class maildir support?
  - 15457345234 3y ago
    Why does Thunderbird need to support maildir? I just never understood this use case.
    - jcrawfordor 3y ago
      A very traditional way to run a mail system is to have the mailserver store the user's mail in their home directory, typically in either maildir or mbox format. Mail clients can then read mail directly from the same place the mail server stores it, rather than having to maintain their own copy. This is a very handy optimization and a lot of "traditional" (read: TUI) mail clients fully support and, indeed, were primarily designed to be used this way. Common TUI mail clients tend to assume a local maildir or mbox, and accessing mail boxes via IMAP is a feature bolted on later, sometimes a bit awkwardly. A major advantage is that it allows all of the mail tools you might use to operate on the same working copy of your inbox, saving a lot of time synchronizing things. This was a lot more important historically when a typical Unix user would probably have a few different tools they used for mail, like a full-on TUI mailbox viewer and a couple of CLI tools. I don't find it very compelling that Thunderbird needs to add this functionality, because that's a pretty old-fashioned way of running mail that you probably won't see outside of technical universities and other institutions with a very "traditional" approach to their systems. That's the use-case, though, and I do see that if you are in an environment where your mail is already present in your home directory, or you use multiple mail clients, it would be annoying that Thunderbird can't operate this way when a lot of its contemporaries can. It's practically more of an issue, though, because Thunderbird kind of supports it, it's just incomplete. That makes it feel less like a feature Thunderbird doesn't have and more like a bug.
      - eru 3y ago
        One nice thing about maildir is that eg command line grep just works.
        anthk 3y ago
        Also reading maildirs it's much faster than an mbox file.
        eru 3y ago
        Yes, if you have a good enough filesystem, that doesn't mind reading thousands of tiny files. Or housing tens of thousands of files in a directory. (I suspect that wasn't always the case. Especially over NFS or so?)
        anthk 3y ago
        Yes, over NFS it's slow, but nowadays everyone has local devices or they just login via SSH or virtualize whole desktops. Still, if you have over 100k emails, mbox will be slow to parse for obvious reasons as it has to parse every line with often having mboxes as huge as 500MB if not more. Your FS and VFS layers will do a far better task on reading the first lines of thousands of files. In such case your mail client will parse the headers to generate the inbox layout in a much faster way.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
        jcranmer 3y ago
        > Still, if you have over 100k emails, mbox will be slow to parse for obvious reasons as it has to parse every line with often having mboxes as huge as 500MB if not more. No, you don't. You store in your metadata database what the offset of the message in the mbox file is. If you don't have such a metadata database, then you're going to be very slow no matter what the storage is.
    - kragen 3y ago
      if thunderbird doesn't support maildir, either you can't store your email in a maildir, or you can't use thunderbird. maildir has some real advantages, and so does thunderbird, and it would be nice to be able to combine them
      - silon42 3y ago
        I have used maildir for a long time, but I just run a local IMAP server to do this... (dovecot) IMO this is a superior way.
        kragen 3y ago
        that's an excellent point: imap is a standard protocol for decoupling your mail client from your mailbox format
    - bandrami 3y ago
      Fetchmail on my laptop fetches messages from the IMAP server and procmail + postfix delivers them (after some mangling) to the maildir in my home directory. So whatever mail client I use needs to be able to read that.
    - NikkiA 3y ago
      Maildir is probably the best way to handle multiple readers one mail source, ie, reading your mail from two+ locations, two+ operating systems, whatever. IMAP just kludges, and you end up with situations like I have, where thunderbird frequently reports that one mailbox is 'locked' because thunderbird crashed while accessing it several years ago and who knows how to get gmail to forget about imap 'locks'.
      - 15457345234 3y ago
        > thunderbird frequently reports that one mailbox is 'locked' because thunderbird crashed while accessing it several years ago That's a lockfile left over on the local filesystem. That's caused by Thunderbird having two threads open on the same folder (i.e. you ran 'update all folders' and then 'compact folders' and they're overlapping) If you open TB, let it sit for a while, then do file>offline>sync now - then let it complete - make sure all the folders are selected for local download (if this is applicable or viable for your use case) then wait a while then do 'compact folders' it shouldn't happen again You might also want to go into the 'account settings' and turn 'maximum number of server connections to cache' down to 2 - some IMAP servers get really bothered if you open too many connections to them. It's meant to autoadjust but it doesn't always. 2 lets you have one connection always open to the inbox for push mail and one available for working on other folders.
        NikkiA 3y ago
        > then wait a while Yeah, that was underselling it a little, it took over an hour to download all 60,000 emails. Time will tell as to whether it happens again, but regardless, thanks for the pointers.
        15457345234 3y ago
        Yeah TB behaves a lot nicer when you have a 100% complete snapshot of the IMAP account locally; a lot of things in it seem to work a lot faster and more predictably when all the folders are fully synced. I'd run that 'offline->download/sync' every week or so. It'll automatically sync every folder you open, but running that syncs them all, and if you're an organisation fiend like me you have like 100 folders. In addition you can take a manual backup of your email now by just zipping up the thunderbird profile folder. Always useful.
- ahi 3y ago
  https://www.neowin.net/news/linus-torvalds-asks-covid-vaccine-conspiracy-theorist-to-shut-the-hell-up/ https://www.neowin.net/news/linus-torvalds-asks-covid-vaccin...
  - eru 3y ago
    Which goes to show that even crazy people can sometimes be helpful.
- kelnos 3y ago
  Oh man, he'd been on our (Xfce) mailing list for a while, sending a ton of merge requests for various cleanups to our window manager and other components. While I wouldn't say what he was doing was completely useless, it was generally not super helpful, didn't really need to be done, and mainly just caused code churn. On my less charitable days it felt like he was just trying to get his name out there and into the commit history of a lot of projects, but the time and effort he was spending was probably too much if that was the motivation. Several of his MRs ended up becoming out of date and full of merge conflicts because of other work that was being done, and it just seemed like a waste of time to me. Someone downthread posted a link where Linus Torvalds himself excoriates this guy for posting anti-vaxxer nonsense to the lkml. That... really takes the cake.
  - noobermin 3y ago
    Wow, it's good to see he swung the xorg guys somehow.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    This is one of the most uncharitable views I think you could take. You don't seem to have a nice thing to say about him. And have managed to pack a bit of negative insinuation in without any actual evidence or substance. Frankly, the dude is involved in cleaning up X.org code that is otherwise verging on unmaintainable. The appropriate response is a shrug and a "thanks". Backbiting is generally the wrong approach to attempted OSS contributions. If you have problems with his PRs go bring them up with him.
    - jcranmer 3y ago
      There was a talk a long time ago (sorry, can't credit it) where the speaker pointed out that some contributors end up providing net negative value to the project: the value of their contributions is outweighed by the amount of time spent interacting with them in bug reports or the like. There are two reports in this thread of the contributor here derailing a conversation with something irrelevant. Another report is of him providing low benefit/high noise patches. If you start reading the mailing list posts linked up thread, his contributions to X.org seem to be veering in this direction too: the most recent idea is to... replace include guards with #pragma once. He was called out for this by the X.org maintainers (see https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-devel/2024-February/059159.html https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-devel/2024-February/059159...).
pests 3y ago
I like this one https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-devel/2024-February/059137.html https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-devel/2024-February/059137... Huge block of code just sitting around for 16 years completely unused.
jraph 3y ago
Does someone know why this person would care about dead code in X?
- AlienRobot 3y ago
  Maybe he really, really, REALLY doesn't want to switch to Wayland.
- akira2501 3y ago
  > outside of the XWayland scope given the diminishing developer interest and lots of talk but little action by those anti-Wayland holdouts in the community to actually contribute to X.Org Server development. I don't know.. maybe they're actually rising to this "challenge." Although, I've never understood why the presence of Wayland means X.Org needs to disappear. To me it seems part of our modern churlish desktop software cult that is perennially annoyed that their new systems, while slightly more visually appealing, have actually removed more useful features than they have added and fail to be a compelling upgrade on their own. So, instead of making anything better, they focus on destroying what already exists.
  - alpaca128 3y ago
    > I've never understood why the presence of Wayland means X.Org needs to disappear Same. I'm on Wayland right now and I already know the next installation will run X11. Nothing against Wayland but so far all functional differences I noticed were things that don't work anymore. I don't expect everything to work exactly the way it was previously, but nonexistent alternatives for X11 tools are a dealbreaker for me.
    - deadbunny 3y ago
      I had the same issues. I try Wayland whenever I end up with a new machine or do a reinstall for whatever reason. It felt like death by a thousand cuts just small things like inconsistent drag and drop behaviour, the primary clipboard working in some places and not in others etc. Things that are just ingrained in my daily use being inconsistent or broken ever so slightly just become intolerable even after a few days of tweaking and tracking down 5 year old bug reports with no action. I might have a better time using one of the big 2 DEs but (using KDE on a Surface Pro with Wayland has been fine) but i3/Sway are my preferred WMs and I'm not giving them up. Maybe in another 2 years.

jcranmer 3y ago

I was going to say the name was somehow familiar. Then I went searching through the Mozilla bug tracker and found this comment: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=58308#c90 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=58308#c90.

bravura 3y ago
I understand your frustration with the heady enthusiasm of the poster but: Isn’t it true that Thunderbird sixteen years later still lacks complete and first-class maildir support?
- 15457345234 3y ago
  Why does Thunderbird need to support maildir? I just never understood this use case.
  - jcrawfordor 3y ago
    A very traditional way to run a mail system is to have the mailserver store the user's mail in their home directory, typically in either maildir or mbox format. Mail clients can then read mail directly from the same place the mail server stores it, rather than having to maintain their own copy. This is a very handy optimization and a lot of "traditional" (read: TUI) mail clients fully support and, indeed, were primarily designed to be used this way. Common TUI mail clients tend to assume a local maildir or mbox, and accessing mail boxes via IMAP is a feature bolted on later, sometimes a bit awkwardly. A major advantage is that it allows all of the mail tools you might use to operate on the same working copy of your inbox, saving a lot of time synchronizing things. This was a lot more important historically when a typical Unix user would probably have a few different tools they used for mail, like a full-on TUI mailbox viewer and a couple of CLI tools. I don't find it very compelling that Thunderbird needs to add this functionality, because that's a pretty old-fashioned way of running mail that you probably won't see outside of technical universities and other institutions with a very "traditional" approach to their systems. That's the use-case, though, and I do see that if you are in an environment where your mail is already present in your home directory, or you use multiple mail clients, it would be annoying that Thunderbird can't operate this way when a lot of its contemporaries can. It's practically more of an issue, though, because Thunderbird kind of supports it, it's just incomplete. That makes it feel less like a feature Thunderbird doesn't have and more like a bug.
    - eru 3y ago
      One nice thing about maildir is that eg command line grep just works.
      - anthk 3y ago
        Also reading maildirs it's much faster than an mbox file.
        eru 3y ago
        Yes, if you have a good enough filesystem, that doesn't mind reading thousands of tiny files. Or housing tens of thousands of files in a directory. (I suspect that wasn't always the case. Especially over NFS or so?)
        anthk 3y ago
        Yes, over NFS it's slow, but nowadays everyone has local devices or they just login via SSH or virtualize whole desktops. Still, if you have over 100k emails, mbox will be slow to parse for obvious reasons as it has to parse every line with often having mboxes as huge as 500MB if not more. Your FS and VFS layers will do a far better task on reading the first lines of thousands of files. In such case your mail client will parse the headers to generate the inbox layout in a much faster way.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
        jcranmer 3y ago
        > Still, if you have over 100k emails, mbox will be slow to parse for obvious reasons as it has to parse every line with often having mboxes as huge as 500MB if not more. No, you don't. You store in your metadata database what the offset of the message in the mbox file is. If you don't have such a metadata database, then you're going to be very slow no matter what the storage is.
  - kragen 3y ago
    if thunderbird doesn't support maildir, either you can't store your email in a maildir, or you can't use thunderbird. maildir has some real advantages, and so does thunderbird, and it would be nice to be able to combine them
    - silon42 3y ago
      I have used maildir for a long time, but I just run a local IMAP server to do this... (dovecot) IMO this is a superior way.
      - kragen 3y ago
        that's an excellent point: imap is a standard protocol for decoupling your mail client from your mailbox format
  - bandrami 3y ago
    Fetchmail on my laptop fetches messages from the IMAP server and procmail + postfix delivers them (after some mangling) to the maildir in my home directory. So whatever mail client I use needs to be able to read that.
  - NikkiA 3y ago
    Maildir is probably the best way to handle multiple readers one mail source, ie, reading your mail from two+ locations, two+ operating systems, whatever. IMAP just kludges, and you end up with situations like I have, where thunderbird frequently reports that one mailbox is 'locked' because thunderbird crashed while accessing it several years ago and who knows how to get gmail to forget about imap 'locks'.
    - 15457345234 3y ago
      > thunderbird frequently reports that one mailbox is 'locked' because thunderbird crashed while accessing it several years ago That's a lockfile left over on the local filesystem. That's caused by Thunderbird having two threads open on the same folder (i.e. you ran 'update all folders' and then 'compact folders' and they're overlapping) If you open TB, let it sit for a while, then do file>offline>sync now - then let it complete - make sure all the folders are selected for local download (if this is applicable or viable for your use case) then wait a while then do 'compact folders' it shouldn't happen again You might also want to go into the 'account settings' and turn 'maximum number of server connections to cache' down to 2 - some IMAP servers get really bothered if you open too many connections to them. It's meant to autoadjust but it doesn't always. 2 lets you have one connection always open to the inbox for push mail and one available for working on other folders.
      - NikkiA 3y ago
        > then wait a while Yeah, that was underselling it a little, it took over an hour to download all 60,000 emails. Time will tell as to whether it happens again, but regardless, thanks for the pointers.
        15457345234 3y ago
        Yeah TB behaves a lot nicer when you have a 100% complete snapshot of the IMAP account locally; a lot of things in it seem to work a lot faster and more predictably when all the folders are fully synced. I'd run that 'offline->download/sync' every week or so. It'll automatically sync every folder you open, but running that syncs them all, and if you're an organisation fiend like me you have like 100 folders. In addition you can take a manual backup of your email now by just zipping up the thunderbird profile folder. Always useful.
ahi 3y ago
https://www.neowin.net/news/linus-torvalds-asks-covid-vaccine-conspiracy-theorist-to-shut-the-hell-up/ https://www.neowin.net/news/linus-torvalds-asks-covid-vaccin...
- eru 3y ago
  Which goes to show that even crazy people can sometimes be helpful.
kelnos 3y ago
Oh man, he'd been on our (Xfce) mailing list for a while, sending a ton of merge requests for various cleanups to our window manager and other components. While I wouldn't say what he was doing was completely useless, it was generally not super helpful, didn't really need to be done, and mainly just caused code churn. On my less charitable days it felt like he was just trying to get his name out there and into the commit history of a lot of projects, but the time and effort he was spending was probably too much if that was the motivation. Several of his MRs ended up becoming out of date and full of merge conflicts because of other work that was being done, and it just seemed like a waste of time to me. Someone downthread posted a link where Linus Torvalds himself excoriates this guy for posting anti-vaxxer nonsense to the lkml. That... really takes the cake.
- noobermin 3y ago
  Wow, it's good to see he swung the xorg guys somehow.
- roenxi 3y ago
  This is one of the most uncharitable views I think you could take. You don't seem to have a nice thing to say about him. And have managed to pack a bit of negative insinuation in without any actual evidence or substance. Frankly, the dude is involved in cleaning up X.org code that is otherwise verging on unmaintainable. The appropriate response is a shrug and a "thanks". Backbiting is generally the wrong approach to attempted OSS contributions. If you have problems with his PRs go bring them up with him.
  - jcranmer 3y ago
    There was a talk a long time ago (sorry, can't credit it) where the speaker pointed out that some contributors end up providing net negative value to the project: the value of their contributions is outweighed by the amount of time spent interacting with them in bug reports or the like. There are two reports in this thread of the contributor here derailing a conversation with something irrelevant. Another report is of him providing low benefit/high noise patches. If you start reading the mailing list posts linked up thread, his contributions to X.org seem to be veering in this direction too: the most recent idea is to... replace include guards with #pragma once. He was called out for this by the X.org maintainers (see https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-devel/2024-February/059159.html https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-devel/2024-February/059159...).

pests 3y ago

I like this one https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-devel/2024-February/059137.html https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-devel/2024-February/059137... Huge block of code just sitting around for 16 years completely unused.

jraph 3y ago

Does someone know why this person would care about dead code in X?

AlienRobot 3y ago
Maybe he really, really, REALLY doesn't want to switch to Wayland.
akira2501 3y ago
> outside of the XWayland scope given the diminishing developer interest and lots of talk but little action by those anti-Wayland holdouts in the community to actually contribute to X.Org Server development. I don't know.. maybe they're actually rising to this "challenge." Although, I've never understood why the presence of Wayland means X.Org needs to disappear. To me it seems part of our modern churlish desktop software cult that is perennially annoyed that their new systems, while slightly more visually appealing, have actually removed more useful features than they have added and fail to be a compelling upgrade on their own. So, instead of making anything better, they focus on destroying what already exists.
- alpaca128 3y ago
  > I've never understood why the presence of Wayland means X.Org needs to disappear Same. I'm on Wayland right now and I already know the next installation will run X11. Nothing against Wayland but so far all functional differences I noticed were things that don't work anymore. I don't expect everything to work exactly the way it was previously, but nonexistent alternatives for X11 tools are a dealbreaker for me.
  - deadbunny 3y ago
    I had the same issues. I try Wayland whenever I end up with a new machine or do a reinstall for whatever reason. It felt like death by a thousand cuts just small things like inconsistent drag and drop behaviour, the primary clipboard working in some places and not in others etc. Things that are just ingrained in my daily use being inconsistent or broken ever so slightly just become intolerable even after a few days of tweaking and tracking down 5 year old bug reports with no action. I might have a better time using one of the big 2 DEs but (using KDE on a Surface Pro with Wayland has been fine) but i3/Sway are my preferred WMs and I'm not giving them up. Maybe in another 2 years.