
Microsoft's war on plain text email in open source - dddddaviddddd
https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=159843434525592&w=2
======
hyperrail
The Register's original story [1] makes clear that the problem was not
Microsoft's mail clients:

 _> “It is a fairly specific workflow that is a challenge for some newer
developers to engage with. As an example, my partner submitted a patch to
OpenBSD a few weeks ago, and he had to set up an entirely new mail client
which didn’t mangle his email message to HTML-ise or do other things to it, so
he could even make that one patch. That’s a barrier to entry that’s pretty
high for somebody who may want to be a first-time contributor.” _

_> We assumed that Outlook was to blame. Could Microsoft fix that instead?
“The question always is fix it to whose standards, because we are focused much
more on business and enterprise models of clients and customers. For them we
fixed it to a more HTML-based model so it really depends on who your audience
is and who your target is.” _

_> It turned out, though, that this time Outlook was not guilty. “I think it
was actually Gmail that was a barrier. And he also couldn’t do it from Apple
Mail. It is just that the modern mail client has intentionally moved towards
HTML,” she said. _

[1]
[https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/25/linux_kernel_email/](https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/25/linux_kernel_email/)

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Minor49er
The gist of this is that a new OpenBSD contributor couldn't figure out how to
open a text email with their current email client. It was set to use HTML
messages only. So this developer had to install an entirely new client just to
handle messages. Therefore, open source communications must change to use a
new system of some sort, presumably like GitHub.

The rest of the thread is rightfully criticizing the claim for its absurdity.

~~~
mrbonner
This reminds me of a sysadmin in one of my previous company tried to edit a
Solaris config file in Word. He told me he couldn’t make it to work after he
ftp it to the server. I looked at file and saw those CR characters and found
out he used Word to edit it.

~~~
btschaegg
You can still end up in such situations today without the absurdity of using
word, if you're using Windows.

I've wasted an hour or so this year trying to figure out why an instance of
Microsoft's sshd port of OpenSSH didn't behave as configured.

It took a while for me to realize that if you create/change the config files
with Windows tooling, they will likely end up being encoded in UTF-16, which
means that every second byte is a NUL character. If you have a C codebase
expecting UTF-8 (like most UNIX-ish tools), that can lead to the config files
just being ignored (as the tool likely hits a NUL before the first real
character). In the case of sshd, you won't get any warnings or errors, either.

~~~
fomine3
PowerShell (before Core version) uses UTF-16 for default encoding, I wonder
who is happy by this default encoding.

~~~
JdeBP
You need to know your history in order to understand this. Very briefly:
Development on Windows NT began in 1989, three years before UTF-8 was even
invented; and there was a difference of opinion between the ISO people and the
Unicode Consortium over Unicode being 16-bit or 32-bit, with Joseph D. Becker
famously publishing a paper in 1988 declaring that 16 bits were sufficient for
Unicode ("with a safety factor of about four").

------
jzelinskie
Since it was not previously mentioned, Sarah Novotny (while at Google) was on
the original bootstrap committee that organized the Kubernetes ecosystem. This
is by no means "Microsoft attacking Linux" or promoting GitHub; this is a
personal critique from someone that has helped to create a more approachable,
better organized, large scale project for the Linux Foundation already.

------
edent
I agree. I wanted to make a minor change to the Linux kernel. Nothing more
complicated than fixing a typo.

Getting everything configured correctly was a pain. Finding out who to email
for an unexpected hurdle. It took a bunch of emails back and forth until I got
the format right.

I did it, but it put me off contributing again.

Would I have become a top-notch kernel developer if the process was easier?
No. But I'd certainly have done some of the boring busy-work to fix minor
issues.

I appreciate the workflow is set in its ways. And it probably (intentionally?)
prevents a lot of casual abuse of the process. But surely there's a better way
to let new people contribute?

~~~
nickysielicki
1\. make change in git, commit it with a good message.

2\. call ./scripts/get_maintainer.pl -f on the file you changed

3\. call git send-email -1 --cover-letter --annotate and tell it where to send
the patch.

4\. done

This is significantly _easier_ than clicking a bunch of buttons on a slow
Github or Gitlab instance.

~~~
viraptor
You forgot `0. setup outbound mail`. Which may include figuring out how to
setup a smartrelay. Which for some provider leads to explicitly enabling mail
submission and generating a separate auth token for your email provider. Which
you will need to learn about by searching multiple pages. Ah, and if you're in
a corp environment, forget about sending anything out on port 25 - you'll need
to figure out a proxy as well.

If you're working with that project every day - sure, that's trivial.

If you're sending a drive-by patch useful to others, it's really in the
project's best interest to make it as easy as possible. In at least one case I
ended up sending an email like "This is a patch, it's in public domain now,
your change process is so annoying I'm not going to spend the next hour to set
it up, KTHXBYE".

~~~
JdeBP
I have a couple such on my WWW site. (-:

But in fairness edent's problems were finding out who to address the mail to
and how to format the message, not how to actually use electronic mail in the
first place; and one might as well note that the procedure is also missing
"learn how to plug in a keyboard" and "learn how to edit C source code", if
one is going to take it that far.

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jonchang
This should probably just be updated to point to The Register's article:
[https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/25/linux_kernel_email/](https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/25/linux_kernel_email/)

~~~
yodon
From the register article:

> It turned out, though, that this time Outlook was not guilty. “I think it
> was actually Gmail that was a barrier. And he also couldn’t do it from Apple
> Mail. It is just that the modern mail client has intentionally moved towards
> HTML,” she said.

------
lxe
It would be nice to use something akin to Github... I don't care if it's
SVN/Trac, Gitlab, or whatever -- mailing lists + patches have their
limitations and there are better ways to organize OS development. It certainly
isn't a 'war' though.

------
jcranmer
There's a certain irony I found that some of the emails in the thread get
mojibaked due to the mailing list server apparently not knowing how to
indicate the charset properly.

------
rgoulter
This was a nice post explaining git and email
[https://drewdevault.com/2018/07/02/Email-driven-
git.html](https://drewdevault.com/2018/07/02/Email-driven-git.html) and a
website that looks nice. [https://git-send-email.io/](https://git-send-
email.io/)

I'm curious if any sourcehut users here could explain more about sourcehut's
code review tools. Do they make email-based code reviews easier?

------
syntheticnature
This isn't exactly new, in terms of Microsoft email tools being a pain to use
for submitting patches without HTML munging. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's
been a problem for over a decade. The only new part here is them making
suggestions.

That said, from my experiences hosting email lists, that might indirectly be
the higher bar to entry. So many providers' anti-spam policies basically treat
discussion lists as spam, especially if you are so bold as to have multiple
subscribers who use that one list. Gods forbid one of the users manages to
delete their address or let it go stale without unsubscribing first and the
list software lets a single email get bounced.

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papaf
_That 's a barrier to entry that's pretty high for somebody who may want to be
a first-time contributor._

I think that's actually a good thing. The person has to be interested enough
to setup and learn about plain text email. Its not discrimination based on
race, religion or gender identity but discrimination based on interest.

Even simple barriers to entry have positive effects. I found that the quality
of bug reports on Gitlab is much higher than on Github because everyone has a
Github account and will happily spam a project with a lazy bug report (me
included).

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mfcl
Surely if you want to patch the Linux kernel, then you can deal with text
based emails?

~~~
drchiu
I was just thinking this as well when I read that sentence.

Plain text emails are a pretty low bar in terms of technical challenges if one
could submit Linux kernel patches.

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bakli
The verge article paints a different picture, which I kind of agreed with (as
someone who has grown as a developer in last 5-10 years). But then again, I
haven't contributed to Linux so it might be a bad thing. FWIW, the problem
with email clients seem to be with Google and Apple. My Outlook mail client
handles the text email very well!

------
mastrsushi
That's on Microsoft to come up with an alternative. A replacement would be
like if plain Git was entirely replaced with a modern looking front end.

You can have your pretty javascript applets, but please don't mess with the
greybeards.

Linux needs as many people as possible. Don't scare any of those people away.

------
k_sze
Would it help if mail clients can be configured with a list of e-mail
addresses or domains that are known to prefer plain text, and then
automatically warn the user and suggest to switch to plain text? Arguably such
mail clients can come with a preconfigured, default list of well-known
addresses or domains.

That way the user doesn't have to go out of their way to find the plain-
text/html switch.

Another improvement is that mail clients implement a MarkDown or
reStructuredText editing mode that will automatically generate a multipart
message with both plain text and html parts. Is there any mail client like
that out there?

------
jpollock
Perhaps the ability to submit a patch in the required format is a fizzbuzz?

~~~
smt88
> _a fizzbuzz_

You mean a ceremonial hurdle that has absolutely no bearing on that person's
worthiness to work on a particular project?

Yes, it does sound like a fizzbuzz.

~~~
lokedhs
More like the absolute minimum one would expect any contributor to be able to
produce.

I'm not a fan of coding interviews, but being able to produce a functioning
fizzbuzz should not be considered very difficult.

~~~
smt88
Something easy can suddenly be impossible when you're anxious or under
pressure.

If someone can't do fizzbuzz, they won't be able to do things that are actual
signals of ability (like finish a side project or a take-home project).

------
morpheuskafka
How is this a "war" on plain text email? It is a true statement and it doesn't
really sound like a huge corporate initiative, just a personal comment from
one of the executives.

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neonate
[https://web.archive.org/web/20200827033621/https://marc.info...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200827033621/https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-
misc&m=159843434525592&w=2)

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minedwiz
Apparently Microsoft engineers can't hit the button in Outlook to turn the
email to plain text.

~~~
syntheticnature
At least in the past, on Outlook, that used to still munge attached patches to
Windows line-ends instead of DOS, which was still a problem.

That's Microsoft's fault, but if you are at some smaller shop trying to submit
a patch, it can be a royal pain in the neck, especially if the admin is a
Microsoft fan and only wants to run Exchange protocol.

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cV6WB
But how could anyone possibly be productive without using Outlook? /s

------
emptyparadise
Is there a GUI mail client that's preconfigured to work with mailing list and
patch workflows?

~~~
jlgaddis
mutt in an xterm works quite wonderfully.

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philliphaydon
I can’t view that Marc site on mobile. I have to horizontal scroll text...

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warrenq
Ha Ha,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy)

"Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal
interface."

------
dang
Url changed from [https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-
misc&m=159843434525592&w=2](https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-
misc&m=159843434525592&w=2), which points to this article.

Edit: I decided to revert that switch. The article it points to is
[https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/25/linux_kernel_email/?](https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/25/linux_kernel_email/?).

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eckza
Man, they are really getting aggressive with Embrace-Extend-Extinguish these
days.

High barrier to entry for Linux kernel patching seems like a feature, not a
bug.

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tehabe
HTML in email is awful but sadly in most place it has won. In Apple Mail you
can't attach pictures to plain text email w/o them being converted to HTML
again. Gmail behaves completely different. And on Android you can't really
deal with fixed lines of plain text emails.

But what is even worse is, that most clients create extreme awful HTML,
Outlook comes to mind. In a few version they put in the font-family "sans-
serif" instead of sans-serif. Which meant the fall back would fail.

