Re: ugly hacks (was: Re: We are not a mail forwarding service)

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

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