On 5/21/22 13:39, John Levine wrote:
Every deployed hack (including NAT) is ugly but "works" in isolation, provided you only consider the use cases you care about. It's when multiple hacks (each with limited applicability) are layered that the problems crop up. And yet, quite often the proposed solutions are to add more ugly hacks that are themselves of limited applicability.I've been using this hack on my own mailing lists since 2015. If it were breaking other things, we'd probably know by now.
Oh, this particular hack might be relatively benign. I haven't
tried to analyze it yet.
It's the "it's an ugly hack but it works" anti-pattern that I
wanted to point out.
Perhaps even worse is the anti-pattern: "if it were breaking
other things, we'd probably know by now".
The Internet is quite diverse, and it's easy to inadvertently do
harm to others' interests without ever realizing it. There's also
an unfortunate tendency to tell oneself "if I don't see it, it
must not be a problem". Especially when your pet hack prevents
others from doing something that was useful to them, and you won't
see what your hack has broken partly because that hack has made
the Internet less useful for those other purposes.
Keith
