Re: smtp crap

[chad]

On Oct 26, 2011, at 3:32 PM, Drew Adams wrote:

>>> This is nothing but a regression - reporting a bug with `emacs
>>> -Q' has never been a problem in past releases.  Why burden 
>>> and confuse users now?
>> 
>> I have personally seen dozens, of emacs bug reports sitting 
>> stuck in local mail queues, with the user having no idea that 
>> the bug never made it beyond the local workstation.  
>> I am not the only one to report this kind of problem. 
>> This type of configuration is (as near as we can tell) at 
>> least as common now than it was then.
> 
> Yes, that is undesirable.

Undesirable, well know, and obviously the opposite of ``has never been
a problem in the past'', as you knew before you wrote those words.  It
also pretty clearly answers the question ``Why burden and confuse
users now?''.

> The solution is to simply _mention_ in the bug-report instructions that "IF 
> you
> have no mail client and IF you have not yet configured Emacs itself as a 
> mailer,
> THEN invoke `M-x XYZ' to so configure it.", where XYZ is a command that leads
> you down whatever configuration garden path is required.

So, you want to ask the user, in the middle of reporting a bug, to
notice that there's a warning somewhere, and then guess whether or not
emacs can send mail without extra steps on their part, when we know
that a common failure mode is ``it doesn't work and the user can't
reasonably know that it didn't/won't work''.  Seems like a pretty poor
default to me. YMMV.

*Chad