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Comment by nimish | Hacker News Reader

The worst part of Postgres (and linux) is the awful mailing list driven development process. I have patches to Postgres that I'd rather just keep porting up every version than to try to figure out how to make Outlook work with a 1980s process.

The internals themselves are quite nicely engineered as you'd expect

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You are unable to send a message with an attachment? Or what's the problem specifically?

I don't want to waste my time with a process that has zero benefits to me

So you'd have the same complaint about a Github pull request?

No, a GitHub PR has benefits that far exceed a mailing list post, to me

> how to make Outlook work

Well that’s your first problem. Unless you’re using corporate email?

Correct. It's corporate email. Imagine the amount of contributions that are gated behind stupid email policies because some fossil mailing list client can't handle modern email in the year of our lord 2025

> Outlook

> modern email

That can't be true. Now, I haven't used Outlook myself, but I've received enough garbage from that godforsaken relic of a time when MS wanted to EEE email to know that that can't be true.

FWIW, I've posted patches to the PG mailing list just fine with GMail. The web app, that is.

OK. Every major corporation uses Outlook and there is no way I can change that so by not accepting its foibles you are artificially stopping interested contributors who would do it on company time and hardware

It's a very FOSS pathology.

If by "pathology" you mean "we optimize for the comfort of the people already actively engaged in the project instead of hypothetical future contributors", I don't think this argument is as strong as you think it is.

If anything, this kind of excessive legal and process red tape is much more common in enterprise-driven vs. community-driven open source projects.

No that's not what I mean, don't put words in my mouth.

> excessive legal and process red tape

I just wanna hit "Send" in my standard email client, not set up pine and debug a mail spooler

Parent probably means that email clients don't send the attachments (patches) with the appropriate content type (i.e. text/x-patch or text/x-diff) but use application/octet-stream.

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