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Comment by dbecker | Hacker News Reader

sheer disdain displayed for good-but-differing practices is depressing.

Funny you should criticize the postfix community for this. Did you see what they are responding to?

Source control (SCM/VCS) is a MUST have. It's unbelievable that people just work with tarballs without proper source control. It doesn't matter which you use, but it must be available. Sending patches over email is what people did last century...

I think the "kids these days" comment was in reference to someone waltzing in, contributing nothing, and demanding everything immediately be done their way.

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Contribution is not a prerequisite for criticism. Deserved criticism, in this case.

VCS is being used, so the criticism is unfounded:

"i would suggest that you ask questions first or be quiet the postfix author is using a VCS but he do not need to provide access to you or me "

Anyone can criticise anything for any reason.

Criticism is so easy to generate that it is worth absolutely nothing.

The process they use works for them.

I guarantee that I could come into your place of work and criticise pretty much everything you do, pointing out that there is a better way of doing it (because there will be, from some angle).

This is not useful, and whether or not I am correct on any specific point it is unlikely to be well received.

If you can come into my place of work and find out that we don't have backups, we're not hashing customer passwords, everyone is sharing a single user account, or we don't lock the doors at night, please do criticize.

Rejecting widely accepted good/necessary practice like that for no apparent reason other than "it's working for us so far" is stupid, arrogant, irresponsible, and wrong.

In this case, however, the criticism is unfounded because Postfix is using source control internally. Whether the system is exposed to the public is inconsequential as long as it's being used.

There is no way you can spin it as anything even remotely close to okay if there was no change tracking in the Postfix project at all.

It's absolutely useful and it's telling that you think it is not.

Open source, closed VCS.

That was never appropriate.

"You MUST" isn't criticism, it's a demand.

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