I was always perplexed when I had to change the ordering of my accounts and still had to do it manually by editing the configuration after all these years. A big improvement for sure!
I did back in February, but I'm unlikely to be able to completely accurately recount that now.
One thing I do remember is Ryan explaining how just being willing to directly ask people for money has been surprisingly effective.
It's also worth putting Thunderbird's relationship to Mozilla in proper perspective: for all intents and purposes, Thunderbird is a completely independent project. Since 2017 (https://blog.thunderbird.net/2017/05/thunderbirds-future-hom...), the Mozilla Foundation has primarily acted as Thunderbird's fiscal home, providing support for donations / bookkeeping / taxes / legal matters much in the same way that the Software Freedom Conservancy hosts Git, Homebrew, Inkscape and others, or how Software in the Public Interest hosts PostgreSQL, systemd, Xorg, FFmpeg, 0 A.D, and more.
If I understand last year's MZLA Technologies announcement correctly (https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/), it sounds similar to the split between the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation, where the former is a legal non-profit and the latter entity is for-profit and able to enter into commercial, revenue-generating agreements, but still wholly owned by the non-profit Foundation.
...But you should really listen to the podcast, I could be getting all of this wildly wrong.
Thunderbird is no longer funded by Mozilla. Fortunately there is an active community keeping it running and developing it further. But to survive long term, the project needs funding.
Thunderbird’s funding goes toward the significant infrastructure and staff that must be maintained to deliver the application to our tens of millions of users. For Thunderbird to survive and continue to evolve, we need your support and ask for your donation today. All the money donated will go directly to funding Thunderbird development and infrastructure.
They aren't receiving any funding so there is no expectation of profit. I assume the project will be around so long as enough donations keep coming in to make upkeep worthwhile.
Although it's sad that this will replace the plugins that provide this feature, it's good to see support built into the core and a continued investment in implementing standards.
An email client in this day and age does not receive the attention a web browser does, but Thunderbird has been a steady companion to me over many, many years. Thanks, dev team!
Worse than not using it for navigation is using hjkl for something else. I cannot not press j by accident. Years ago I had to stop using thunderbird for this.
I would like to give thanks for building and supporting Thunderbird. I recently found Migadu at the top of HN and decided to give it a go. Now I'm using Thunderbird on all of my OSs (aside from iOS). I wish I could support it financially, but I'm still a student and not loaded with cash.
Can someone explain what the deal with 91 is? I'm on 78, and no updates are found.
On the submission's web site there is "Thunderbird version 91.0 is only offered as direct download from thunderbird.net and not as an upgrade from Thunderbird version 78 or earlier."
There was a pretty significant departure in how the plugin/add-on ecosystem worked iirc. Not just a case of switching out a few deprecated function calls.
Plugin developers don't bother testing on the betas. They wait until an update breaks things and then work based on user complaints.
And who can blame them really, no one pays them to work on these plugins. If you wanted to make sure your plugins worked before an update than you should go test them on a beta yourself.
Unfortunately delaying an update doesn't really solve the problem as developers still wait for the "its broken" reports before fixing things.
They should have done the same with Firefox Mobile... still only about 12 addons available... almost a year after release. I still use Fennec for this reason.
Was there a separate release for 78 to fix the iirc four potential code execution vulnerabilities? (On a phone atm so I haven't checked myself, but since people are saying no update available for their 78, it sounds like no?!)
For years Thunderbird has been poorly maintained and releases were skipped. This release is to align Thunderbird version with Firefox version... but I don't know why.
Seems to be the deliberate choice to delay automatic update for now. From the release notes:
> Thunderbird version 91.0 is only offered as direct download from thunderbird.net and not as an upgrade from Thunderbird version 78 or earlier. *A future release will provide updates from earlier versions.*
I've used Thunderbird for many years, but recently switched to KMail because that has proper search functionality. In KMail, I can instantly search for a keyword in all my emails from the last one and a half decade, whereas this takes several minutes in Thunderbird, and during the search the UI is unusable because the result list is incrementally populated which makes it impossible to actually click on results reliably, or even just scroll.
Other than that, Thunderbird works great. I'm just puzzled why search has not received more attention, as it seems like a pretty important feature to many people.
edit: I know about NotMuch by the way, and actually used that to search and then navigated to the result in Thunderbird afterwards by sorting by date. But that got annoying in the long run.
I've used it for decades and still recommend it to others (mainly becauce I never invested in trying enough other cross-platform alternatives), but 'great' wouldn't be a word I'd use to describe it, there are just so many little quirks and annoyances, to the point I often have the feeling using it is constantly working around and/or ignoring those.
Yes, by "great" I guess I meant "great in comparison to other desktop email clients". KMail for example comes with its own set of quirks and annoyances, many that are similar to Thunderbird's with regards to general UX.
To me there is not a single client which isn't off somehow, missing something. I feel like nobody really loves mail client development, because email kinda sucks. Mail just needs to die IMO. You wouldn't design something like email today. I wouldn't want to support all the legacy "features" either. It's a wonder someone is caring about these clients at all.
It's not like mail is going anywhere soon. Look at the fax. There is many decades of infuriating mail client dependecy ahead.
When I was implementing it in KMail, I was looking at Thunderbird, and envious of their fancy search UI. I had plans of implementing something similar, but it never panned out.
This is the so-called "quick search" by the way, which works as a filter and displays results in the inbox. There is also another search feature in Thunderbird which renders results differently. I never got used to that, and never used it, as I found its semantics unpredictable.
I don't think they have a way for users to fund individual features, but you can help feature development in general by donating: https://give.thunderbird.net
Since the most recent comments indicate that they have it on the roadmap, I think that would also help the specific feature you care about.
I've been looking for something like this for numerous projects. If I can't write the code myself, I'd love to pay someone who can, but I don't know where to look.
I am a bit sad that the release notes say nothing about encryption.
PGP support was (for me) the big thing about thunderbird 78. It was a bit rough around the edges (in terms of UI and extension support) but I expected it to improve with subsequent releases. Now it sounds like they did not iterate on encryption at all (apart from fixing a few bugs).
(This is from reading the release notes. I did not yet have time to test the new version.)
How does the term "Primary Password" describe the password which enables access to the list of credentials better than "Master Password"? Are they just entertained by the alliteration?
Master/Slave nomenclature is considered "problematic language" (because it harks back to slavery), and thus often replaced with more PC language these days. My organization had a whole "fix this nomenclature throughout the whole codebase" week (things like "black-/whitelist, master/slave, ....)
Fine, but at least make it consistent then. GitHub uses "main" and now this uses "primary", next someone will use "base" and I'm not sure at all how this is better in any way.
That's hardly in the hands of any one developer to make consistent, and it was hardly entirely consistent before. As long as it makes sense in the context of a given project...
In the context of a master password, it doesn't make sense to change it. It's analogous (closely, but not perfectly) to "master key", a term which non-nerds may be familiar with from the world of physical keys (and which term, in that context, isn't going anywhere, in part because, as with this one, there's no reason whatsoever for it to) so gave normal folks a better handle on what it means and how to use the software.
There's no reason they should be consistent. Different git hosts, sure, but a master branch and master password have nothing in common but the name (which is now different).
Amid the currently fashionable trend of language culling, I was mildly surprised to find myself agreeing with this particular change: In git, I think "main" is a better choice than "master", because it more accurately and succinctly reflects the intent.
(In general, though, I think the trend is misguided and counterproductive.)
'Master' is not counterpart to 'slave', it is counterpart to 'inferior'. 'Master' is "greater" (ex 'magis'), vs "lesser". The most resounding example is fitting: «Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas».
It is an ___extreme___ problem if somebody now thought [I change the tense out of refusal] that the term 'master' should not be used, especially if the perverse excuse were that someone used it in a way that makes somebody uncomfortable.
Following an old proverb, reportedly from or nobilitated by Cervantes, you are invited "not to mention the rope in the house of the hanged". But never in history, to the best of my knowledge, someone ever advanced the idea that given that people had been hanged, the term 'rope' should stop being used at all.
The term 'master' is innocent. And it has close to fullest right to be part of the language.
And there is a further matter of care given these desperate times in history: suspicion that a war against the semantic of "master" could be involved, given the many raising voices making all individuals equivalent in intellect, preparation and judgement, in the area of Asimov's warning:
«The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge"»
I see, but if you take a term like 'bunny'* and then for some reason it becomes - I don't know - a sensational sexual innuendo in south Boston or the whole of the continent, it is not a fault of 'bunny', and one cannot expect that others in Anywheristan start having problems with 'bunny' out of somebody's folly.
* the first term I could think of, probably as I am writing from a field having plenty of them nearby.
> one cannot expect that others in Anywheristan start having problems with 'bunny' out of somebody's folly
well that's the funny thing about language - it's very democratized in some ways. After a while, if even 10% of people use it to actively mean something sexual, the majority of people will know that it's meant to indicate something sexual.
while this might be true, the fact that there are master-slave analogies elsewhere makes other uses of master in CS suspect.
if the analogy had been "master-apprentice" instead there probably wouldnt be as much pushback everywhere else. while this particular instance might be an over correction, i think the overall trend has been a move in the right direction
> if the analogy had been "master-apprentice" instead there probably wouldnt be as much pushback everywhere else
Except, you know, apprentices eventually become masters themselves. And the space isn't zero-sum; "Master Verrochio taught Master Leonardo" is semantically valid. It doesn't illustrate the semantics of, say, data replication where there is only one master at a time and the slaves are not supposed to be promoted. "Master-slave" captures the relationship succinctly.
True, it hearkens back to a dark time in US history but if that is the only criteria for censoring usage of this term, are we not also censoring discussions about this period? I agree with the sentiment to be ashamed of it but to the point where you can't even derive metaphors from it? Reeks of cowardly denial.
>only one master at a time and the slaves are not meant to be promoted.
So not like a historical master-slave relationship.
Master-slave may capture the relationship, but humans still have to read, write and interact with those systems.
Some of those humans still suffer from the legacy of slavery, jim crow and voter suppression.
We can come up with analogies and metaphors which arent so evocative and make working with systems more pleasant just on account of not flippantly referencing the darkest part of societies history.
This might be a difference in values but to describe the metaphor as "flippant" is rather puritan don't you think? It's not as if the metaphor is reducing the gravitas of the issue. It does not even make a value judgment on whether or not slavery is wrong. It is a neutral metaphor at best.
If we as a society move to a state where a metaphor like so is verboten just because it is less pleasant or already considered "evocative" then how can we have deep and nuanced discussions on this period itself? You know the ones where we explicitly acknowledge the horrors of slave dehumanization, the terrible working conditions in the plantations, the violence stemming from these racist beliefs, among others.
Those issues are too heavy to be evoked by the metaphor (and frankly irrelevant to its purpose) and yet our current trajectory would want people to do away with it when it only serves to illustrates the relationship between computing resources. It's not even a comment on social history.
However, languages live and the people of the USA are an important determinant of where the English language is headed. They have a particular history involving this word, and that history has not been fully reckoned with. It makes sense that the same word, although in other contexts with a slightly different meaning, would be redefined or removed this way, in order to deal with that history.
Natural languages violate the sort of origins and logical meanings all the time, so this does not have to be an exception.
I am not sure if I will be able to convey the point as well as I wish, but:
don't you think this way the enemy wins a battle?
Terrorists attempt bending politics through terrorizing: if one is terrorized, is that one not playing their game?
We greet in some sensible way, say, and somebody comes and promotes the greeting as now meaning "short people should stick to accounting": that somebody should not be nobilitated and their """cultural proposal""" accepted as norm: it should be discarded as noise. If the greeting were affected and linked to some unworthy agenda, that would mean empowering said agenda: it should have been impotent, but with your attention, and attributing it legitimacy in the creation of constraints, you made it powerful.
«Languages live», but uprooted they go astray. A rubberband, like that vetting attitude you (yes really you) have been trained to develop, should always there to check validity, vis-a-vis what terms mean, coremost to how they are used. One is supposed not to forget that core.
"Congratulations for having defaced our public square by defecating in the middle: you now get the privilege to do similarly with our sacred vocabulary".
So should not we speak language, as an attempt, instead of «USA [determined] English language» or «natural language»?
And more to the point, should not we avoid acting as resonance chambers amplifying deeds? Some culturally inferior party is not supposed to bend culture with the "strength of inferiority" - that is absurd. It is not a "de facto" bending, it is the "de facto" response to it that gives it power.
That is nonsensical. There is no such thing as a line language should not stray too far from. Languages are what they are, plain and simple. The fact that you speak English, is already a horrible affront to the French, the Celts, Angles, Saxons, both in their current day form and that of yesteryear, and any precursors to those languages in turn. English shouldn't even have the Latin-derived 'master' in the first place, if we're going that way.
I am absolutely sensitive to the argument that 'master' originally, or in some other context, is not opposed by 'slave', but 'inferior' or somesuch. And it is how I've used the word, and how it and its native equivalent is used in my native tongue. But that is no argument for fixing a particular meaning or context as more important or 'native' than any other.
Language is fundamentally, deeply promiscuous, and English may be the most promiscuous of them all. If this is a problem for you, your best bet is a dead language, or one you create yourself. You can fork anything you wish after all, that's how languages work :)
> that is no argument for fixing a particular meaning or context as more important or 'native' than any other
You missed from my argument that the above statement is part of my argument: it is normal for language to also represent controversial (contextually) cases, but «that is no argument for fixing [such] particular meaning or context as more important» or having priority over, especially, its core meaning.
You are missing that I oppose an appropriation, that reduces of that richness of applications to a "yes but, you see, we cannot forget what happened in Khartoum, there is no return from that episode and now if you mention it I can only think of the event". No, the richness is intact, you are covering it. And the subsequent argument I proposed, replying to you, contains: beware while covering it of not being supportive to some political effort you would otherwise oppose.
Example: one extremist a few years ago apparently instructed his followers, their music shall be that of Depeche Mode - their guts should resonate with that; the authors of «the grabbing hands grab all they can» and «we are going backwards, to a caveman mentality» showed being less than impressed. If people stopped listening to Depeche Mode because an extremist finds their sound instrumental to hook underdeveloped prefrontals, and now there is an association, they should be dehypnotized. The extremist or another could have invented that 'depeche' is now a world that means their attempt world domination: I am not saying that Gore Gahan and Fletcher have a full right to the word, I am saying that one would not be justified to call the word "now embarassing" because some fool came up with his low fumes.
If we measured our associations with the worse in society, we would be in deep trouble, repeat:
supporting and justifying associations following the worse in society is a recipe for collective damage.
Never empower the "wrong side". If already you allow them to bend your vocabulary...
Technically, for the rest: a term is a pattern, one can apply it metaphorically to a large number of cases. (Its transliteration is largely irrelevant - 'jñāna', 'gnoscere', 'know'...) The core meaning is found navigating to the "original" pattern behind all applications. Etymology helps you with that. Forgetting the core pattern is what I called uprooting.
The word fa***t predates it’s use as a slur for homosexuals, but I don’t think anybody reasonable would argue that it’s not commonly perceived as an offensive term. These are obviously different degrees of subjective “offensiveness”, but my point is that people don’t sit down and work out the etymology before deciding if something makes them feel bad.
Snowflake is an insulting term for overly sensitive SJWs... but it's also a word for an actual snowflake. No matter how offensive it is to someone, we still need a word for literal snowflakes falling from the clouds.
"Master Key" precedes or is parallel to the Atlantic slave trade. I don't believe it has a root in slavery. Master Password is surely more related to Master Key than to any other sense of Master.
Not arguing that it should or shouldn't be changed. They can change it for alliteration for all I care. Just want to talk about this etymology because that interests me.
in my mothertongue a lot of words were misused during the course of time.
they had no bad connotation when they were introduced, but then they were used by "bad people" (by current standards) and now they are "dead" or rather "not to be used"
Language is complicated, but I think I agree. Here are the most relevant bits I found just now in the Oxford English Dictionary:
master, n.1 and adj.
[...]
Origin: Of multiple origins. Partly a borrowing from Latin. Partly a borrowing from French. Etymons: Latin magistr-, magister; French maistre.
[...]
The classical Latin word has numerous Romance and Germanic derivatives, e.g. Italian maestro (compare maestro n.), Spanish maestro, Portuguese mestre (compare maistry n.); Old Frisian mastere, mestere (West Frisian master), Middle Dutch meester, meister, mester (Dutch meester), Old Saxon mēstar (Middle Low German mēster, mester, meyster, Low German meester), Old High German maistar, maister, meistar, meister (Middle High German meister, German Meister; compare Meistersinger n.), Old Icelandic meistari (Icelandic meistari), Norwegian (Nynorsk) meister, Old Swedish mæstare (Swedish mästare), Old Danish mester (Danish mester). See also mistress n.
Senses in all four branches are paralleled by uses in Latin, in branch A. III. initially reflecting use of Latin magister in the medieval universities.
With uses at branch A. IV., compare adjectival use in French in the sense ‘principal’ (applied to people from c1100 in Old French, to material objects and immaterial things from the 12th cent. in Anglo-Norman); compare also Italian maestro , used adjectivally in this sense from the 14th cent.
[..."Master-gate" was the closest I could find to master password or key...]
Compounds
C2. Applied in extended use to things, with the sense ‘main’, ‘principal’, ‘controlling’, ‘originating’. In such compounds master is generally construed as a noun, but in some cases the grammatical character of the compound is uncertain or fluctuating, and master may be considered to be functioning as an adjective.
a. Of material things. Esp. frequent in terms relating to building and the human body (in non-technical use), and later to machinery, electronics, etc.
master-gate n.
1340 Ayenbite (1866) 249 (MED) Þe mouþ..is þe mayster gate of þe castele of þe herte.
a1500 (▸?c1450) Merlin 422 He com to the maister yate of the paleys.
c1720 N. Dubois & G. Leoni tr. A. Palladio Architecture II. iii. 7 The chief Entry, or Master gate.
1998 Re: Sad Sight on Test Center in rec.games.computer.ultima.online (Usenet newsgroup) 8 Feb. I created a new character and walked through a Master Gate to do exactly what you do.
The way these things happen is someone makes a suggestion in the company. Anyone who wants to oppose this change has a risk of being labelled racist. Now, you don't want to be "one of those" people, do you? So, these things get pushed through without anyone challenging it. It is self-censorship.
Also, on that note some Slavic countries might request their naming and history be changed to something delinked from slavery...
Shall we rename Slovenia and Slovakia, too?
Exactly. I am always shocked about some terms becoming a matter of sensation, yet those people condemning them oftentimes use the term 'slave' in their expression, instead of, say, the original 'servant'. And following their "feeling", there should be very few terms more offensive than 'slave' (it means that the default servant is a Slav).
And contextually, 'slave' comes from 'Slav', not the opposite: you meet a Pispathian, you decide that a "pisp" (which incidentally in local language with a good chance means "valiant" or similar) is a reifiable one of a reifiable people, and after the insult they should also change their name?!
> some Slavic countries might request their naming and history be changed to something delinked from slavery... Shall we rename Slovenia and Slovakia, too?
If they want to rename themselves, we should use their new names.
I think the original poster meant that Slovenia and Slovakia would never think of renaming themselves, especially not for the absurd reason that the Romans attached an unflattering association with their name.
Edit: read my original sentence as "and after the insult they should also be thought considering changing their name?!".
The root of the names Slovakia (Slovensko) and Slovenia (Slovenija) trace back to "slovo", literally "word" (denoting people who speak the same language).
The world often divides in two. Surely, relevantly,
-- those who think that language is what median people use and that naive use has a right to be accepted and create rules, seeing language as a social matter, and
-- those who think that language is what the learned have built out of competence and reflection, calling language an entity rightfully separate from societies.
For both parties «language matters». But they do not speak the same language - the second party refuses to accept bastard semantics, illegitimately born "from the saddle of incompetence". Their conclusions are opposite.
The notion that language is "what the learned have built out of competence and reflection" is abjectly risible. The evolution of language consists of corruption, confusion, coinages of demotic provenance, and general chaos. The contributions of learned classicists to the modern language are subject to exactly the same inexorable flux.
There is no party that refuses to accept "bastard" semantics; in no language does there exist a fraction of a syllable of legitimate descent. The only recourse open to the pedant and misanthrope is to forgo the use of language altogether, which would in your case constitute a marked improvement in the discourse.
False, if only because it is evident that naive and competent are evident opposites, practically. You can see the competent and the naive use, they cannot be mixed.
By the way: you have completely misunderstood 'is' in the quotation. It was not descriptive language, it was deontic.
And for what your «which would in your case constitute a marked improvement in the discourse»: this is the first time I find myself in front of the shallow disrespect that I expect elsewhere from YCombinator. Happily - look around -, with that attitude, you are the one isolated.
That assumes that the word master has a root in slavery. It was certainly used during slavery in the Americas. But it is much older. And changing the label does not change the ingredients. The impression that the word master is strongly associated with slavery is a concept that exist in that form only in the USA. But nevertheless, activists continue to fight dictionary entries instead of the problem they claim to be fighting.
The fight over every day language is a tool of opresive regimes, e.g. Hitler used it, Stalin used it, the DDR used it. I miss evidence that this fight has ever yielded positive outcomes.
"master" is a "blocklisted" word now. I also think it's silly to change the word on places which doesn't have "slave"s (e.g. github master branch > main branch switch), but well..
I read a gitlab blog[0] where they mention that "master" comes from bitkeeper where there was a master repository and slave repositories.
It does make one wonder, if there was more diversity in CS when these things were being made whether "master-slave" analogies would have made it in or whether other analogies like "parent-child", "major-minor", "leader-follower" or similar would have made it in.
In the end it doesn't really matter once the word has gotten tainted. It's still ugly that incorrect deductions spread so quickly and corrections don't.
The master-slave terminology is used outside of CS as well. For example in EE we have master-slave edge-triggered D or JK flip-flops. I don’t feel strongly either way about such word use but I am fine with renaming them too. The fact that such change is so triggering to some people is strange!
It would be quite ironic if, after all those changes, the words “primary” and “secondary” would simply become the synonyms of “master” and “slave”.
And it wouldn’t be even that improbable, in my opinion at least. In the end, in many languages the word “figuratively” was so overused as a stand in for “literally”, that it became it informal synonym (I know for sure that it is a thing in both English and Polish, but it is probably more widespread). If words of completely opposite meaning can be blurred that way, it wouldn’t be so strange for that effect to emerge as a case of euphemism.
> It would be quite ironic if, after all those changes, the words “primary” and “secondary” would simply become the synonyms of “master” and “slave”.
As in, to describe actual human slavery?
Most English-speaking countries don't have actual human slavery any more (or at least, they don't use the words master and slave to describe it.) So when using the words master and slave to refer to actual slavery, it's usually in a historical sense, and it seems unlikely that we'd change the words we use to refer to something in the past.
Sorry, but I do not understand the question. Do you mean as to distinguish slavery relationship in logical systems (as with databases) versus human relations? If so, that wasn’t my intention.
What I was talking about was more about a euphemism replacing an actual word, as with taboo avoidance:
> This terminology for the animal originated as a taboo avoidance term: proto-Germanic tribes replaced their original word for bear — arkto — with this euphemistic expression out of fear that speaking the animal's true name might cause it to appear. According to author Ralph Keyes, this is the oldest known euphemism. [0]
That's very different. There, the thing being referred to is the thing they didn't want to refer to.
Here, there is nothing whatsoever wrong with the _thing_ being referred to (a password, in this case.) The issue is that the commonly used word _also_ has some other associations. So picking a different word means you lose those associations. Not the same thing at all.
The disagreement is not over 'inclusivity' - it's over whether a specific word has anything to do with it.
The #1 failure of social justice activist movements worldwide is to suggest that people who don't agree with a particular policy must somehow be racist/sexist.
It's the giant bit of gaslighting that discredits the movement, and frankly, in some cases, reveals 'truer intentions'.
The assumption that arbitrary words must have anything to do with reality, interpretation, applied nuance or discrimination is problematic to say the least.
As I alluded to in my other reply in this thread [which got downvoted into oblivion] the problem with these SJWs is that their world view is so parochial and [in terms of time] narrow, that they think these terms are offensive because "slavery"... "racism"... even when the terms and their connotations often pre-date their worldview or even their country.
A previous classic example was the same kind of people getting their knickers in a twist over the use of the adjective "black" to describe something bad because... yep, you got it... "slavery"... "racism"...
Anyone with the slightest bit of historical and cultural awareness would realise that the use of "black" as an adjective with negative connotations dates back centuries, if not millennia and blindingly obviously originates from early religious connotations of light being good and darkness being filled with danger and evil. But, of course, to the SJWs, any use of "black' in a negative sense has got to be a veiled reference to American slavery by those evil racists and their non-inclusive language.
It was a black day for the world, when this political correct bullshit became the only acceptable form of expression.
More importantly, why can't Thunderbird and Firefox just integrate with GNOME Keyring / KDE Wallet to retrieve the m...primary password without prompting the user on startup?
So what? A well-designed keychain implementation should be able to deal with a multitude of keychain providers - OS (KDE, Gnome, macOS, not sure about Android and iOS, gnupg smartcards).
And while we are at it the words black, red, yellow, white, fat, skinny, redundant, branch and other words shall be replaced with something else. What can go wrong ? Important is to be pollitically correct. /s
Idiotic 1st world problem (actually, very much a "silicon valley soy latte problem"). I could see "slave" being somewhat problematic and people not wwnting to use it, but going after the word "master", which has nothing to do with a "slave" unless a "slave" is mentioned together with it in the same context, is EXACTLY the kind of overreach that (among other things) makes people vote for weird individuals like DT just out of spite. Many (and I do mean "many" as in "most") IT professionals in Europe are shaking their heads when seeing things like Github changing "master" to "main". It's ridiculous. That's what it is. Why can't American liberas just be normal for a while?
I sometimes wonder how much there could be done for people in need of an actual form of help if all that energy to change unrelated words because someone is triggered by them went into a more useful endeavor.
And beyond that, maybe it is because I am not a native speaker, but isn’t “primary” less clear than “master” in this context? `Master` suggest control/mastery over something, but `primary` rather focuses on importance/order of things, at least in my head.
Native speaker here: yes, “primary” does not mean the same as “master”, and in this case I would argue that the distinction is relevant.
I agree with your assessment. “primary” — to me — implies one of many equally-important passwords. “master” implies a password that protects/overrides/controls all other passwords, which is what Thunderbird’s master password actually is.
Which in this case is doubly ironic, because pirates and buccaneers were exactly the group that had kept the slave trade alive even after it was officially banned in many places, if my limited knowledge on the Atlantic slave trade is correct.
I recall instances where they fought slavery by capturing slave trading ships, freeing the enslaved, and given them freedom and the opportunity to join them and fight the assholes that captured them in the first place. The history of Nassau is pretty interesting.
The hilarity of it all is ego of the Western social justice movement.
By most estimates there are more slaves today than in any other point in history and it's almost entire in Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa. Instead of helping those people, putting sanctions on the countries and companies turning a blind eye on slavery, or even acknowledging that slavery is not history but an ongoing condition - the West spins its wheels changing language in highly unrelated fields.
The absurdity of it all is something out of Camus.
> Hostis humani generis (Latin for "enemy of mankind") is a legal term of art that originates in admiralty law. Before the adoption of public international law,[when?] pirates and slavers were already held to be beyond legal protection and so could be dealt with by any nation, even one that had not been directly attacked.
You are right about "primary" being less clear. In fact I'd say it is wrong.
Primary means it is the "main" one, but it doesn't imply any controlling relationship. It's kind of like "first".
Whereas "master" (in this context) means it has control or power over other things. For example a "master switch" would override all other switches. Or a "master cylinder" on a car controls the slave cylinder.
It's a real shame that they're making things less clear to fix an imagined problem.
The point is not about actually helping anyone, it's in-group out-group signaling. Once you understand the real purpose you will understand it's effective.
As long as you are taking it at face value you will continue to be confused in this way, and you will continue to lose.
Yet another case of an organisation giving in to pressure from a vocal minority of activists.
Master does not mean the same as Primary. Master does not mean the same as Main. Efforts to replace Master with alternative, less precise words make it harder to understand what things are actually meant to be doing.
This kind of corporate "we need to be seen to be doing something rather than nothing" stuff does wind me up, it just makes people more annoyed (by breaking scripts and causing unnecessary UI changes etc) and less receptive to actual arguments for social change while at the same time producing no practical increase in social justice. It's just inauthentic tokenism designed to keep the baying beast that is Twitter away.
"Show, don't tell" is as good advice for PR as it is for storytelling in my opinion. I don't want you to tell me how great you are at tackling the issues of the day with token changes like this, I want you to show me by actually doing things that demonstrate you believe in the stuff that's coming out of your mouth rather than just trying to appear like a "good person". Changing "master" to "main" or "primary" is as authentic as Facebook or Google saying they care about privacy.
This kind of developer-driven change does not wind me up, because developers working on products should be able to reflect on how those products are part of society and if they choose to make changes in their branding, presentation, or diction, they should be able to do so. Mozilla has a pretty rich tradition of employee activism, as we all observed after the Eich debacle, and I suspect employees want their work to make them feel good in terms of alignment with their bedrock principles. This is true even if individual customers oppose their politics, especially since the vast majority of users will never notice this or read a changelog. Symbolic gestures are part of a program of practically increasing social justice. They do not replace more concrete measures, they are additive in addition to them: Mozilla and Thunderbird should still pursue employment equity, charitable works, and other mission-related goals while doing this.
Although minor, the expression is authentic, and it is normal for symbolic gestures to precede other measures because it's normal to tackle problems through a combination of taking the most important actions and the easiest (even if minor) actions, the same way turning up the freezer a few degrees might not be the most important thing you can do to reduce your footprint but it is something you can do before you finish reading this post.
"Tell" is good advice for changelogs, because the literal purpose of a changelog is to tell the changes that were made. If I'm dumb enough to waste my time reading a changelog (and I obviously am), I do want you to tell me what you actually changed, even if the change is a minor change to diction or a typo fix. Collapsing changelog entries into "changed some in-program text" obfuscates the actual change and does little to demonstrate the actual changes made.
Being very worried about a change from "master" to "main" is as authentic as opponents of social justice quoting MLK to project an image of caring about social justice.
> I suspect employees want their work to make them feel good in terms of alignment with their bedrock principles.
if it makes you feel good to play with words I am not sure if thats a good energy expenditure for your activism. it feels like a cheap way to value signal instead of doing something actually meaningful.
Words have meaning and power. How they are used literally changes the discourse. Your participation in this discussion is proof that the example under consideration has impact well beyond "playing with words."
Different people can interpret words differently. Replacing 'master' is a very low cost change which, IMO, can improve understanding of what is described. (Like main or root branch or vault password.)
So why cling to a word that has so much cultural baggage when it doesn't even work that well in Thunderbird?
> ...why cling to a word that has so much cultural baggage...
Clinging? We're all just talking here and we don't have any authority over this software. Are we allowed to have differing opinions about what already took place? I think so.
Personally, my opinion is that I laugh at these people for their empty virtue signaling that really doesn't help understanding here in this case. We don't have to be clinging in order to discuss how idiotic we think things are.
But the word "master" means a lot in tech. This is like someone changing the word "save" to "store", after many years of use in tech, and everyone knowing the implied meaning, but some minority of users are complaining that "jesus saves, data is stored".
> So why cling to a word that has so much cultural baggage
> when it doesn't even work that well in Thunderbird?
What cultural baggage does the word "master" have? And before you throw around the word "slavery" my grandfather, who passed only 14 years ago, was a slave. I have no qualms with the word "master".
> How they are used literally changes the discourse.
No. People come up with ideas and thoughts, and wanting to express themselves, they seek out looking for words. Peoples ideas and thoughts make up how words are meant.
Yes. They do. But meaning and power sits on a foundation of context and intent. Even emojis rely on this.
The idea that we're going to use words but ignore context and intent is self-defeating. It weakens the powers of human communication. It's as if to say: "Words speak louder than action."
I think lots of people are uncomfortable with language being changed in a top-down way by people who aren't particularly democratically accountable more than anything.
To be honest I'm not sure where I stand on prescriptivism as a concept. If there's a genuine organic demand (as opposed to corporate PR people playing tokenism) for it in the context of tackling racism then fair enough I can get behind that, but I don't really like the idea of language itself being used as a political cudgel to beat your opponents with. The word Orwellian is relentlessly misused these days but I think if we are going to forcefully change language it needs to be something done with great consideration and democratic oversight to avoid this tool being wielded abusively. For example, I'd love to abolish all Americanisms from British English which is exactly why I'd be grossly unfit for such a language-defining duty!
Why "instead"? Why not "in addition to"? Is it logical to think that this change thwarted activism either by employees in their private capacity or Mozilla as an organization, except in the extremely vacuous way that all things are a substitute for all other things because there are only 86,400 seconds in a day and so by definition picking your nose means you're not doing something more productive?
Like, I suspect some of the employees involved in this change also volunteer with organizations, they also donate money to organizations, they also make other changes in their personal life, right? Maybe not all of them. Maybe some of them wake up and think "Social justice is really important to me so I'm going to do an empty virtue signal and then nothing else, wow I'm great". Even if that were true it's not super obvious what the concern is here -- okay, so maybe someone involved in this change could be a better person and could be using their energy more effectively? And? Surely there's a better use of my energy and yours than replying to a patchnotes post on hacker news to get mad about a one word change in a changelog of an email client, and yet here we are.
About half of my post was talking about how symbolic things, while not a substitute for concrete things, are part of making changes, and how often times tackling problems with a combination of the most urgent issues and the easiest to fix issues is normal, so it's weird that the reply would be "Symbolic things just substitute for concrete things and this issue is easy, not urgent". Like, yes, I've already considered your perspective here, that's why I replied to begin with?
My company made the change from blacklist/whitelist to blocklist/allow list over two years ago and people, mostly external, still get annoyed and I just can't understand why. The former is literally one letter different and the latter makes just as much, arguably more, sense than the term it replaced. I get that some people see it as just posturing but you have to start somewhere if you are going to change the culture. Not using colors which are also used to describe people's skin to different between a negative thing and a positive thing is good imo.
I mean honestly, this is typical US stuff. As a european I have never associated blacklist, whitelist or master with any discrimination.
Why instead of changing tech wording affecting every dev worldwide who does not care about american pseudo social justice, just do not call dark er skin „black“ and brighter skin „white“?
I mean still more people are afraid in the absence of light, hence the dark, than otherwise.
And „white“ is often associated with clean, pure. There are psychological effects we can‘t just ignore.
Better just stop associating this pink skin with „white“ and darker skin with „brown“ or „black“.
I mean I still have to see a „white“ person and a „black“ person in real life.
For god‘s sake. Stop finding problems where there are none. Corporate trolling has reached the next level.
I’m glad you don’t have these problems in your European utopia. We still have a lot to work on here - there are race riots every year. Part of our legacy as a very young country that was built with the labor of imported black slaves.
Other connotations of the word blacklist include the blacklisting of labor activists and of accused communists during our multiple bouts of anti communist hysteria. The word is charged with ugly meanings and there’s no reason to throw it around casually in a software project.
Many countries were built with the labour of slaves. I'm a slav, from a slavic country, and the words "slav" and "slave" are not just coincintally similar. We were also a communist country, and the definition of 3rd world (and technically leaders of the 3rd world/nonaligned at the time).
Somehow we have no issues with master/slave. Most people (except failed students and former party members) know communism was a really really shitty system. And most of the current racial issues are imported from america, during the democrats-vs-trump "battles", and are so americanized, that people forget minorities here (gypsies,...), and use BLM for maybe 10 black people that live here.
Last time I checked, your race riots were not caused by software, but by gun violence of untrained police officers. I think it is quite clear, what needs to be banned in the US.
By this logic probably 1/3 of literature is going to have to be banned or edited.
Using 'light' for 'good' which mostly derives from daylight, the sun, daytime etc. and darkness for 'bad' etc. might be the most ancient human metaphor, probably dating back to the time we could tell stories. Our first religion, in Egypt, the Sun was God and the God of the 'Dark Underworld' was the bad guy.
Moreover, it doesn't really have connotation with respect to skin colour.
The important, 'hard' part to social activism is context and nuance and also to understand that not all actions which may have some threadbare logic make sense or actually help.
I have no trouble believing that the sentiment behind those changes is genuine.
However, I'm also somewhat annoyed by these kinds of changes, mostly because I would never have associated the "black" in blacklist with the skin colour until someone started pointing it out as an issue. While some terminology might be actually problematic, from my point of view there was never any problem with the word blacklist until someone started pointing it out. Now there is.
Once you make enough noise about an association like that, the association will certainly be there for more and more people even if it weren't there before. The problem kind of creates itself.
I'm fairly sure many Americans are understandably rather sensitive and sore about skin colour and racial justice right now. I'm not from the US, so depending on where you're from, this might make a difference in perspectives.
I'm also white and of the ethnic majority in my country, so I certainly don't see all the issues that minorities, immigrants or other ethnic groups might face. If it turned out that the word "blacklist" (to give an example) had been seen as an actual issue all along by a significant proportion of black people in my cultural environment or in most of the world, I wouldn't oppose the change. But if it hadn't been previously associated negatively that way, then creating that association and making a fuss about it has actually created a problem (or at least made one much bigger), not solved one.
While changing a term might not be that big of a thing practically, having to react to something you think shouldn't be an issue in the first place can be annoying out of principle. A social dynamic where you need to go along just because someone else sees a potential problem can also be annoying. My guess would be that the majority of people who are annoyed by these kind of changes are annoyed because of something along those lines.
Once you push something that sparks that kind of a reaction in people hard enough, you get people annoyed, and if you then push more, you get them more annoyed.
As for changing the culture, I'd rather like to see people getting much less neurotic about ethnicity and race rather than more so. I facepalmed hard when I read that, according to some people, the "ok" sign had become problematic because some far-right people had started using it, and that it should be avoided. I think that was an absurd stance; if you stop using an otherwise innocuous sign because someone else started using it for a bad purpose, you end up emphasize that new, bad association. (In that case you'd also kind of let the far-right people win, which makes it even more absurd, but that's not directly relevant here.)
The world is full of associations you can make, including ones with colour that matches someone's skin or religious symbol or any number of things. I've noticed that people are more prone to seeing connections, both in terms of reacting to actual ones as well as making less significant or spurious ones, when they feel more sensitive about related issues. It's no wonder if many (especially) Americans are currently trying to spot even the slightest racial issues and want to change the culture to get rid of them.
I'm just not sure I agree with that approach, or with the idea that it's "justice" or the only way to go. Rather than seeing a cultural change where we're so sensitive to racial issues that we try to see every potential negative connotation imaginable and get rid of them, I'm much prefer to see change towards a world where people don't feel the need to see all of those.
I cannot see it as anything other than social conditioning to take something that was previously not an issue and make it into one that now must be "solved". I think that hyper-focus on "racism" only divides people from one another.
I really don't understand the endgame but I feel like a small group of people who would make wonderful evangelicals have grown up into the secular role of "solvers" of "racial issues".
It could also have been that an end user filed a bug report or feature request and made a convincing case. Then someone just reads over the commit logs to write the version announcement. It does just seem to be an outgrowth of the whole "master" branch thing in git and low-hanging fruit for a contributor to tackle. Overall who cares, really. "Primary password" is better than "Main password" IMHO.
I'm also not sure "Master password", "Primary password" or "Main password" are particularly intuitive. Probably better to name the resource like "Thunderbird account database password". Or just prompt to "Unlock password database".
Sure, but I'm willing to bet that next to nobody who doesn't work with encryption makes that analogy. You also don't typically use a "master key" to unlock a locked box of keys so it's not really a great analogy anyway.
Yeah, I'm aware it's not a perfect analogy, but it's still the best you're going to get for communicating the idea succinctly (just with the name, even) to a lay-person. Alternatives like "vault password" or "locker password" (or something along those lines), provided it's made very clear to the user, repeatedly and persistently, that their passwords are in something you're calling a vault or a locker, can be about as good. "Primary", or anything similar, is worse.
No, just a few minutes before that post I posted about a feature that I was happy to see. This was the second item on the massive list of changes that drew my attention.
I like Thunderbird, but several months ago a strange bug happened that caused one sent message to overwrite another sent message (IMAP account). I've noticed only because I needed to resend contents of both messages, and I was really surprised to find that Thunderbird overwrote contents of one message with another (Subject of the overwritten message was intact).
It was a one time bug and it might be caused by my IMAP provider, not Thunderbird, but still I'm worried. I keep almost all my emails, dating back to middle of 90s (although in different formats and accounts), and I would like to be 100% sure that all of them are intact. Now I don't have that peace of mind.
IMAP emails are all addressed by a 32bit UID. Overwriting it would require that you experienced a hash collision, data race, or that your IMAP provider sent out the wrong set of IDs.
It's incredibly unlikely to be Thunderbird's fault.
I've checked again. Only one letter was corrupt and only Subject line was corrupt. I've chosen to fix folder index from folder properties, and voila! The message was fixed.
It wasn't an overwritten message or IMAP bug, it was some corruption of the Thunderbird folder index.
That index is originally created by your IMAP provider - they sent the wrong set of IDs (usually because of a race condition). When you run a fix, Thunderbird checks to see if the provider screwed anything up. It was an IMAP bug.
Not true. The "folder index" being referred to in Thunderbird is the local .msf database which is constructed by Thunderbird to provide its own local information about messages in the folder. Repairing it means throwing away all the local data and requerying it from the IMAP server (or in the case of a local folder, reparsing the mbox file).
The corruption bug likely lay with Thunderbird and not the IMAP server.
I came to see new Thunderbird versions as mostly bad news. Thunderbird as it was 15 years ago was just fine - you can receive emails, you can send emails, and it works well.
At least for me own usage anything they've done since then is breaking plugins that I was using and adding new bugs. I've never seen a release where I thought that whatever they've added was useful.
Are there any plans for full integration of Thunderbird's calendar with iCloud Calendar? I still have to use a web browser to access iCloud Calendar when on Windows, and I don't want to use Outlook.
There are a few blog posts floating around that explain how to extract your iCloud CalDAV access credentials in order to add iCloud calendars to Thunderbird. Last I checked there is no nice GUI for setting that up, if that is what you're after.
Can't you use Message Filters for that usecase? "Move to" and "Copy to" are available actions there or do you just explicitly want an "Archive" option for the filters?
Actually I was thinking of new features. For example, I developed a software application complementary to Thunderbird that used its DB to offer organizer functions (e.g. ranking of emails for task priority according to different parameters etc.)
I realize that many people take what the market offers.
To be fair, even if all the software would be open source, one can not simply have both time and mastery level required to improve the programs one uses.
vivaldi, the successor to opera, has a client in beta. it's not as good as the old m2 client in my opinion but it's quite usable. my main gripes: keyboard navigation still isn't on par, the default is to top quote, no highlight to quote, and no encryption support. this latter doesn't bug me much because no one I know uses it. but it's fast with good search capabilities, automatic indexing, contacts, etc.
mutt and thunderbird are the only 2 clients I have ever found that can make mailing lists usable - gmail threaded view sucks for conversations that have branches, and encourage terrible quoting / top posting practices.
A recent (relatively speaking) redesign of Gmail.com left it less usable and much slower than before, and that drove me back to Thunderbird. Even on a high end machine with fiber, it takes a while to load for me. I still go there occasionally to use the superior search, though.
I think part of this is just time to get used to something new? You might notice some improvements too, for instance only after I started using Fastmail I realized the Gmail UI can be pretty slow and heavyweight although I never noticed this before.
AFAIK you already don't have to use that addon anymore since at least 78 or even earlier. Eg. my only addon in Thunderbird is "Provider for Google Calendar" so that I can sync my calendar with my Android phone other than that I've not used Lightning in forever.
Why are you saying that? There's a Linux version. Although I'ld expect a Linux user to be using their package manager instead anyway. But maybe Thunderbird should eventually release a Flatpak or Snap or AppImage which are cross-distro.
278 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 278 ms ] threadI was always perplexed when I had to change the ordering of my accounts and still had to do it manually by editing the configuration after all these years. A big improvement for sure!
Who are the current team behind Thunderbird? Are they former/current Mozillians, sparing their free time?
Apparently they are hiring: https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/careers/#apply
I am skeptical about using a "monetized" mail client.
Do you have a TL;DL?
One thing I do remember is Ryan explaining how just being willing to directly ask people for money has been surprisingly effective.
It's also worth putting Thunderbird's relationship to Mozilla in proper perspective: for all intents and purposes, Thunderbird is a completely independent project. Since 2017 (https://blog.thunderbird.net/2017/05/thunderbirds-future-hom...), the Mozilla Foundation has primarily acted as Thunderbird's fiscal home, providing support for donations / bookkeeping / taxes / legal matters much in the same way that the Software Freedom Conservancy hosts Git, Homebrew, Inkscape and others, or how Software in the Public Interest hosts PostgreSQL, systemd, Xorg, FFmpeg, 0 A.D, and more.
If I understand last year's MZLA Technologies announcement correctly (https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/), it sounds similar to the split between the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation, where the former is a legal non-profit and the latter entity is for-profit and able to enter into commercial, revenue-generating agreements, but still wholly owned by the non-profit Foundation.
...But you should really listen to the podcast, I could be getting all of this wildly wrong.
> Why we need donations
Thunderbird is no longer funded by Mozilla. Fortunately there is an active community keeping it running and developing it further. But to survive long term, the project needs funding.
Thunderbird’s funding goes toward the significant infrastructure and staff that must be maintained to deliver the application to our tens of millions of users. For Thunderbird to survive and continue to evolve, we need your support and ask for your donation today. All the money donated will go directly to funding Thunderbird development and infrastructure.
They aren't receiving any funding so there is no expectation of profit. I assume the project will be around so long as enough donations keep coming in to make upkeep worthwhile.
Although it's sad that this will replace the plugins that provide this feature, it's good to see support built into the core and a continued investment in implementing standards.
That’s nice. That will make it easy to setup master-data management without additional extensions.
Worse than not using it for navigation is using hjkl for something else. I cannot not press j by accident. Years ago I had to stop using thunderbird for this.
[1] https://github.com/wshanks/tbkeys
Edit: Just installed x64 91 over my 32x Thunderbird 78, no issues so far :)
On the submission's web site there is "Thunderbird version 91.0 is only offered as direct download from thunderbird.net and not as an upgrade from Thunderbird version 78 or earlier."
Why is that? Is upgrading safe?
And thunderbird.net only offers me 78, anyway.
And who can blame them really, no one pays them to work on these plugins. If you wanted to make sure your plugins worked before an update than you should go test them on a beta yourself.
Unfortunately delaying an update doesn't really solve the problem as developers still wait for the "its broken" reports before fixing things.
[0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2021-3...
It seems to be downloadable here: https://download-installer.cdn.mozilla.net/pub/thunderbird/r...
In typical Mozilla fashion, the link to download 91 on their Release Notes [0] page just goes back to their frontpage again.
[0] https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/91.0/releaseno...
> Thunderbird version 91.0 is only offered as direct download from thunderbird.net and not as an upgrade from Thunderbird version 78 or earlier. *A future release will provide updates from earlier versions.*
No, it still isn't.
Other than that, Thunderbird works great. I'm just puzzled why search has not received more attention, as it seems like a pretty important feature to many people.
edit: I know about NotMuch by the way, and actually used that to search and then navigated to the result in Thunderbird afterwards by sorting by date. But that got annoying in the long run.
I've used it for decades and still recommend it to others (mainly becauce I never invested in trying enough other cross-platform alternatives), but 'great' wouldn't be a word I'd use to describe it, there are just so many little quirks and annoyances, to the point I often have the feeling using it is constantly working around and/or ignoring those.
It's not like mail is going anywhere soon. Look at the fax. There is many decades of infuriating mail client dependecy ahead.
When I was implementing it in KMail, I was looking at Thunderbird, and envious of their fancy search UI. I had plans of implementing something similar, but it never panned out.
This is the so-called "quick search" by the way, which works as a filter and displays results in the inbox. There is also another search feature in Thunderbird which renders results differently. I never got used to that, and never used it, as I found its semantics unpredictable.
Not super great visually, but works ok
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=213945
I find a proper 3 pane view to be essential in 2021
Since the most recent comments indicate that they have it on the roadmap, I think that would also help the specific feature you care about.
PGP support was (for me) the big thing about thunderbird 78. It was a bit rough around the edges (in terms of UI and extension support) but I expected it to improve with subsequent releases. Now it sounds like they did not iterate on encryption at all (apart from fixing a few bugs).
(This is from reading the release notes. I did not yet have time to test the new version.)
Shameless plug: I proposed a patch that would bring the compose UI much closer enigmail: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1669788
Finally! Until now I've always had to keep my phone and Thunderbird contacts separate. Now I can finally spend a weekend combining the two.
Amid the currently fashionable trend of language culling, I was mildly surprised to find myself agreeing with this particular change: In git, I think "main" is a better choice than "master", because it more accurately and succinctly reflects the intent.
(In general, though, I think the trend is misguided and counterproductive.)
It is an ___extreme___ problem if somebody now thought [I change the tense out of refusal] that the term 'master' should not be used, especially if the perverse excuse were that someone used it in a way that makes somebody uncomfortable.
Following an old proverb, reportedly from or nobilitated by Cervantes, you are invited "not to mention the rope in the house of the hanged". But never in history, to the best of my knowledge, someone ever advanced the idea that given that people had been hanged, the term 'rope' should stop being used at all.
The term 'master' is innocent. And it has close to fullest right to be part of the language.
And there is a further matter of care given these desperate times in history: suspicion that a war against the semantic of "master" could be involved, given the many raising voices making all individuals equivalent in intellect, preparation and judgement, in the area of Asimov's warning:
«The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge"»
Meanwhile, here in the good ol' USA, we might have mucked up that elegant latin lesson a little bit [0]
0 - http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai/enslavement/tex...
* the first term I could think of, probably as I am writing from a field having plenty of them nearby.
well that's the funny thing about language - it's very democratized in some ways. After a while, if even 10% of people use it to actively mean something sexual, the majority of people will know that it's meant to indicate something sexual.
You've reinvented dialects.
if the analogy had been "master-apprentice" instead there probably wouldnt be as much pushback everywhere else. while this particular instance might be an over correction, i think the overall trend has been a move in the right direction
Except, you know, apprentices eventually become masters themselves. And the space isn't zero-sum; "Master Verrochio taught Master Leonardo" is semantically valid. It doesn't illustrate the semantics of, say, data replication where there is only one master at a time and the slaves are not supposed to be promoted. "Master-slave" captures the relationship succinctly.
True, it hearkens back to a dark time in US history but if that is the only criteria for censoring usage of this term, are we not also censoring discussions about this period? I agree with the sentiment to be ashamed of it but to the point where you can't even derive metaphors from it? Reeks of cowardly denial.
I think the GP's rope analogy paints a pretty good picture. Should we stop using the word "rope"? Rope has been used in a horrific way in the past.
So not like a historical master-slave relationship.
Master-slave may capture the relationship, but humans still have to read, write and interact with those systems.
Some of those humans still suffer from the legacy of slavery, jim crow and voter suppression.
We can come up with analogies and metaphors which arent so evocative and make working with systems more pleasant just on account of not flippantly referencing the darkest part of societies history.
If we as a society move to a state where a metaphor like so is verboten just because it is less pleasant or already considered "evocative" then how can we have deep and nuanced discussions on this period itself? You know the ones where we explicitly acknowledge the horrors of slave dehumanization, the terrible working conditions in the plantations, the violence stemming from these racist beliefs, among others.
Those issues are too heavy to be evoked by the metaphor (and frankly irrelevant to its purpose) and yet our current trajectory would want people to do away with it when it only serves to illustrates the relationship between computing resources. It's not even a comment on social history.
However, languages live and the people of the USA are an important determinant of where the English language is headed. They have a particular history involving this word, and that history has not been fully reckoned with. It makes sense that the same word, although in other contexts with a slightly different meaning, would be redefined or removed this way, in order to deal with that history.
Natural languages violate the sort of origins and logical meanings all the time, so this does not have to be an exception.
don't you think this way the enemy wins a battle?
Terrorists attempt bending politics through terrorizing: if one is terrorized, is that one not playing their game?
We greet in some sensible way, say, and somebody comes and promotes the greeting as now meaning "short people should stick to accounting": that somebody should not be nobilitated and their """cultural proposal""" accepted as norm: it should be discarded as noise. If the greeting were affected and linked to some unworthy agenda, that would mean empowering said agenda: it should have been impotent, but with your attention, and attributing it legitimacy in the creation of constraints, you made it powerful.
«Languages live», but uprooted they go astray. A rubberband, like that vetting attitude you (yes really you) have been trained to develop, should always there to check validity, vis-a-vis what terms mean, coremost to how they are used. One is supposed not to forget that core.
"Congratulations for having defaced our public square by defecating in the middle: you now get the privilege to do similarly with our sacred vocabulary".
So should not we speak language, as an attempt, instead of «USA [determined] English language» or «natural language»?
And more to the point, should not we avoid acting as resonance chambers amplifying deeds? Some culturally inferior party is not supposed to bend culture with the "strength of inferiority" - that is absurd. It is not a "de facto" bending, it is the "de facto" response to it that gives it power.
That is nonsensical. There is no such thing as a line language should not stray too far from. Languages are what they are, plain and simple. The fact that you speak English, is already a horrible affront to the French, the Celts, Angles, Saxons, both in their current day form and that of yesteryear, and any precursors to those languages in turn. English shouldn't even have the Latin-derived 'master' in the first place, if we're going that way.
I am absolutely sensitive to the argument that 'master' originally, or in some other context, is not opposed by 'slave', but 'inferior' or somesuch. And it is how I've used the word, and how it and its native equivalent is used in my native tongue. But that is no argument for fixing a particular meaning or context as more important or 'native' than any other.
Language is fundamentally, deeply promiscuous, and English may be the most promiscuous of them all. If this is a problem for you, your best bet is a dead language, or one you create yourself. You can fork anything you wish after all, that's how languages work :)
You missed from my argument that the above statement is part of my argument: it is normal for language to also represent controversial (contextually) cases, but «that is no argument for fixing [such] particular meaning or context as more important» or having priority over, especially, its core meaning.
You are missing that I oppose an appropriation, that reduces of that richness of applications to a "yes but, you see, we cannot forget what happened in Khartoum, there is no return from that episode and now if you mention it I can only think of the event". No, the richness is intact, you are covering it. And the subsequent argument I proposed, replying to you, contains: beware while covering it of not being supportive to some political effort you would otherwise oppose.
Example: one extremist a few years ago apparently instructed his followers, their music shall be that of Depeche Mode - their guts should resonate with that; the authors of «the grabbing hands grab all they can» and «we are going backwards, to a caveman mentality» showed being less than impressed. If people stopped listening to Depeche Mode because an extremist finds their sound instrumental to hook underdeveloped prefrontals, and now there is an association, they should be dehypnotized. The extremist or another could have invented that 'depeche' is now a world that means their attempt world domination: I am not saying that Gore Gahan and Fletcher have a full right to the word, I am saying that one would not be justified to call the word "now embarassing" because some fool came up with his low fumes.
If we measured our associations with the worse in society, we would be in deep trouble, repeat:
supporting and justifying associations following the worse in society is a recipe for collective damage.
Never empower the "wrong side". If already you allow them to bend your vocabulary...
Technically, for the rest: a term is a pattern, one can apply it metaphorically to a large number of cases. (Its transliteration is largely irrelevant - 'jñāna', 'gnoscere', 'know'...) The core meaning is found navigating to the "original" pattern behind all applications. Etymology helps you with that. Forgetting the core pattern is what I called uprooting.
Cites:
* https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/978019953...
* https://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/don...
blacklist predates black people being enslaved in America.
It's PC war on words that distorted their original meaning.
A "glass masters of Murano" makes beautiful art with glass, because he's a master in that craft.
Doesn't matter if the word has been distorted to mean something bad for a brief period of human history.
Slave is the offending word, not master.
We should have master branch or master database, but secondary branch and secondary database, instead of "slave" ones.
And given the stuff that was between us, i don't get why i should let other people tell us whether we should be offended by that word or not.
Combine hipster virtue signalling with Americans' legendary cultural and historical parochialism and you get a perfect storm of this kind of idiocy.
Not arguing that it should or shouldn't be changed. They can change it for alliteration for all I care. Just want to talk about this etymology because that interests me.
they had no bad connotation when they were introduced, but then they were used by "bad people" (by current standards) and now they are "dead" or rather "not to be used"
I guess it's the same in English :)
But times change
that's why I am on team Lighbringer... go Luci, go!
master, n.1 and adj.
[...]
Origin: Of multiple origins. Partly a borrowing from Latin. Partly a borrowing from French. Etymons: Latin magistr-, magister; French maistre.
[...]
The classical Latin word has numerous Romance and Germanic derivatives, e.g. Italian maestro (compare maestro n.), Spanish maestro, Portuguese mestre (compare maistry n.); Old Frisian mastere, mestere (West Frisian master), Middle Dutch meester, meister, mester (Dutch meester), Old Saxon mēstar (Middle Low German mēster, mester, meyster, Low German meester), Old High German maistar, maister, meistar, meister (Middle High German meister, German Meister; compare Meistersinger n.), Old Icelandic meistari (Icelandic meistari), Norwegian (Nynorsk) meister, Old Swedish mæstare (Swedish mästare), Old Danish mester (Danish mester). See also mistress n.
Senses in all four branches are paralleled by uses in Latin, in branch A. III. initially reflecting use of Latin magister in the medieval universities.
With uses at branch A. IV., compare adjectival use in French in the sense ‘principal’ (applied to people from c1100 in Old French, to material objects and immaterial things from the 12th cent. in Anglo-Norman); compare also Italian maestro , used adjectivally in this sense from the 14th cent.
[..."Master-gate" was the closest I could find to master password or key...]
Compounds
C2. Applied in extended use to things, with the sense ‘main’, ‘principal’, ‘controlling’, ‘originating’. In such compounds master is generally construed as a noun, but in some cases the grammatical character of the compound is uncertain or fluctuating, and master may be considered to be functioning as an adjective.
a. Of material things. Esp. frequent in terms relating to building and the human body (in non-technical use), and later to machinery, electronics, etc.
master-gate n.
1340 Ayenbite (1866) 249 (MED) Þe mouþ..is þe mayster gate of þe castele of þe herte.
a1500 (▸?c1450) Merlin 422 He com to the maister yate of the paleys.
c1720 N. Dubois & G. Leoni tr. A. Palladio Architecture II. iii. 7 The chief Entry, or Master gate.
1998 Re: Sad Sight on Test Center in rec.games.computer.ultima.online (Usenet newsgroup) 8 Feb. I created a new character and walked through a Master Gate to do exactly what you do.
And contextually, 'slave' comes from 'Slav', not the opposite: you meet a Pispathian, you decide that a "pisp" (which incidentally in local language with a good chance means "valiant" or similar) is a reifiable one of a reifiable people, and after the insult they should also change their name?!
> some Slavic countries might request their naming and history be changed to something delinked from slavery... Shall we rename Slovenia and Slovakia, too?
If they want to rename themselves, we should use their new names.
Edit: read my original sentence as "and after the insult they should also be thought considering changing their name?!".
Source: born there
to put it in another way: if master has to be removed because of slavery in america, then we should also remove the words chain, boat and trade.
I am able to connect chains to slavery, but pussy?
-- those who think that language is what median people use and that naive use has a right to be accepted and create rules, seeing language as a social matter, and
-- those who think that language is what the learned have built out of competence and reflection, calling language an entity rightfully separate from societies.
For both parties «language matters». But they do not speak the same language - the second party refuses to accept bastard semantics, illegitimately born "from the saddle of incompetence". Their conclusions are opposite.
There is no party that refuses to accept "bastard" semantics; in no language does there exist a fraction of a syllable of legitimate descent. The only recourse open to the pedant and misanthrope is to forgo the use of language altogether, which would in your case constitute a marked improvement in the discourse.
By the way: you have completely misunderstood 'is' in the quotation. It was not descriptive language, it was deontic.
And for what your «which would in your case constitute a marked improvement in the discourse»: this is the first time I find myself in front of the shallow disrespect that I expect elsewhere from YCombinator. Happily - look around -, with that attitude, you are the one isolated.
The fight over every day language is a tool of opresive regimes, e.g. Hitler used it, Stalin used it, the DDR used it. I miss evidence that this fight has ever yielded positive outcomes.
It does make one wonder, if there was more diversity in CS when these things were being made whether "master-slave" analogies would have made it in or whether other analogies like "parent-child", "major-minor", "leader-follower" or similar would have made it in.
[0] https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2021/03/10/new-git-default-bra...
In the end it doesn't really matter once the word has gotten tainted. It's still ugly that incorrect deductions spread so quickly and corrections don't.
And it wouldn’t be even that improbable, in my opinion at least. In the end, in many languages the word “figuratively” was so overused as a stand in for “literally”, that it became it informal synonym (I know for sure that it is a thing in both English and Polish, but it is probably more widespread). If words of completely opposite meaning can be blurred that way, it wouldn’t be so strange for that effect to emerge as a case of euphemism.
As in, to describe actual human slavery?
Most English-speaking countries don't have actual human slavery any more (or at least, they don't use the words master and slave to describe it.) So when using the words master and slave to refer to actual slavery, it's usually in a historical sense, and it seems unlikely that we'd change the words we use to refer to something in the past.
Sorry, but I do not understand the question. Do you mean as to distinguish slavery relationship in logical systems (as with databases) versus human relations? If so, that wasn’t my intention.
What I was talking about was more about a euphemism replacing an actual word, as with taboo avoidance:
> This terminology for the animal originated as a taboo avoidance term: proto-Germanic tribes replaced their original word for bear — arkto — with this euphemistic expression out of fear that speaking the animal's true name might cause it to appear. According to author Ralph Keyes, this is the oldest known euphemism. [0]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bear#Etymology
Here, there is nothing whatsoever wrong with the _thing_ being referred to (a password, in this case.) The issue is that the commonly used word _also_ has some other associations. So picking a different word means you lose those associations. Not the same thing at all.
The #1 failure of social justice activist movements worldwide is to suggest that people who don't agree with a particular policy must somehow be racist/sexist.
It's the giant bit of gaslighting that discredits the movement, and frankly, in some cases, reveals 'truer intentions'.
The assumption that arbitrary words must have anything to do with reality, interpretation, applied nuance or discrimination is problematic to say the least.
As I alluded to in my other reply in this thread [which got downvoted into oblivion] the problem with these SJWs is that their world view is so parochial and [in terms of time] narrow, that they think these terms are offensive because "slavery"... "racism"... even when the terms and their connotations often pre-date their worldview or even their country.
A previous classic example was the same kind of people getting their knickers in a twist over the use of the adjective "black" to describe something bad because... yep, you got it... "slavery"... "racism"...
Anyone with the slightest bit of historical and cultural awareness would realise that the use of "black" as an adjective with negative connotations dates back centuries, if not millennia and blindingly obviously originates from early religious connotations of light being good and darkness being filled with danger and evil. But, of course, to the SJWs, any use of "black' in a negative sense has got to be a veiled reference to American slavery by those evil racists and their non-inclusive language.
It was a black day for the world, when this political correct bullshit became the only acceptable form of expression.
You can install and use Gnome/KDE apps on other desktops as well. It's just a bit dependency heavy.
And beyond that, maybe it is because I am not a native speaker, but isn’t “primary” less clear than “master” in this context? `Master` suggest control/mastery over something, but `primary` rather focuses on importance/order of things, at least in my head.
I agree with your assessment. “primary” — to me — implies one of many equally-important passwords. “master” implies a password that protects/overrides/controls all other passwords, which is what Thunderbird’s master password actually is.
By most estimates there are more slaves today than in any other point in history and it's almost entire in Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa. Instead of helping those people, putting sanctions on the countries and companies turning a blind eye on slavery, or even acknowledging that slavery is not history but an ongoing condition - the West spins its wheels changing language in highly unrelated fields.
The absurdity of it all is something out of Camus.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostis_humani_generis
Pirates were referred to as the "enemy of all mankind":
* https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/545158/enemy-of-all...
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52783845-enemy-of-all-ma...
Primary means it is the "main" one, but it doesn't imply any controlling relationship. It's kind of like "first".
Whereas "master" (in this context) means it has control or power over other things. For example a "master switch" would override all other switches. Or a "master cylinder" on a car controls the slave cylinder.
It's a real shame that they're making things less clear to fix an imagined problem.
As long as you are taking it at face value you will continue to be confused in this way, and you will continue to lose.
Master does not mean the same as Primary. Master does not mean the same as Main. Efforts to replace Master with alternative, less precise words make it harder to understand what things are actually meant to be doing.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_about_the_word_n...
"Show, don't tell" is as good advice for PR as it is for storytelling in my opinion. I don't want you to tell me how great you are at tackling the issues of the day with token changes like this, I want you to show me by actually doing things that demonstrate you believe in the stuff that's coming out of your mouth rather than just trying to appear like a "good person". Changing "master" to "main" or "primary" is as authentic as Facebook or Google saying they care about privacy.
This kind of developer-driven change does not wind me up, because developers working on products should be able to reflect on how those products are part of society and if they choose to make changes in their branding, presentation, or diction, they should be able to do so. Mozilla has a pretty rich tradition of employee activism, as we all observed after the Eich debacle, and I suspect employees want their work to make them feel good in terms of alignment with their bedrock principles. This is true even if individual customers oppose their politics, especially since the vast majority of users will never notice this or read a changelog. Symbolic gestures are part of a program of practically increasing social justice. They do not replace more concrete measures, they are additive in addition to them: Mozilla and Thunderbird should still pursue employment equity, charitable works, and other mission-related goals while doing this.
Although minor, the expression is authentic, and it is normal for symbolic gestures to precede other measures because it's normal to tackle problems through a combination of taking the most important actions and the easiest (even if minor) actions, the same way turning up the freezer a few degrees might not be the most important thing you can do to reduce your footprint but it is something you can do before you finish reading this post.
"Tell" is good advice for changelogs, because the literal purpose of a changelog is to tell the changes that were made. If I'm dumb enough to waste my time reading a changelog (and I obviously am), I do want you to tell me what you actually changed, even if the change is a minor change to diction or a typo fix. Collapsing changelog entries into "changed some in-program text" obfuscates the actual change and does little to demonstrate the actual changes made.
Being very worried about a change from "master" to "main" is as authentic as opponents of social justice quoting MLK to project an image of caring about social justice.
if it makes you feel good to play with words I am not sure if thats a good energy expenditure for your activism. it feels like a cheap way to value signal instead of doing something actually meaningful.
So why cling to a word that has so much cultural baggage when it doesn't even work that well in Thunderbird?
Clinging? We're all just talking here and we don't have any authority over this software. Are we allowed to have differing opinions about what already took place? I think so.
Personally, my opinion is that I laugh at these people for their empty virtue signaling that really doesn't help understanding here in this case. We don't have to be clinging in order to discuss how idiotic we think things are.
.. for you. I hope nobody ever insults you.
> How they are used literally changes the discourse.
No. People come up with ideas and thoughts, and wanting to express themselves, they seek out looking for words. Peoples ideas and thoughts make up how words are meant.
Except when they don't.
That's the point.
This change is completely meaningless in practical terms, which means the only value derived is in the heads of those wanting to see the change.
This is why we view it cynically.
Someone commenting cynically on the action does not 'prove' that those words have some kind of influence.
The idea that we're going to use words but ignore context and intent is self-defeating. It weakens the powers of human communication. It's as if to say: "Words speak louder than action."
That's sounds like a quote for 1984.
Which is also just a lot of empty words that make you feel good about the fundamental change you're helping sweep over the world.
To be honest I'm not sure where I stand on prescriptivism as a concept. If there's a genuine organic demand (as opposed to corporate PR people playing tokenism) for it in the context of tackling racism then fair enough I can get behind that, but I don't really like the idea of language itself being used as a political cudgel to beat your opponents with. The word Orwellian is relentlessly misused these days but I think if we are going to forcefully change language it needs to be something done with great consideration and democratic oversight to avoid this tool being wielded abusively. For example, I'd love to abolish all Americanisms from British English which is exactly why I'd be grossly unfit for such a language-defining duty!
Like, I suspect some of the employees involved in this change also volunteer with organizations, they also donate money to organizations, they also make other changes in their personal life, right? Maybe not all of them. Maybe some of them wake up and think "Social justice is really important to me so I'm going to do an empty virtue signal and then nothing else, wow I'm great". Even if that were true it's not super obvious what the concern is here -- okay, so maybe someone involved in this change could be a better person and could be using their energy more effectively? And? Surely there's a better use of my energy and yours than replying to a patchnotes post on hacker news to get mad about a one word change in a changelog of an email client, and yet here we are.
About half of my post was talking about how symbolic things, while not a substitute for concrete things, are part of making changes, and how often times tackling problems with a combination of the most urgent issues and the easiest to fix issues is normal, so it's weird that the reply would be "Symbolic things just substitute for concrete things and this issue is easy, not urgent". Like, yes, I've already considered your perspective here, that's why I replied to begin with?
Why instead of changing tech wording affecting every dev worldwide who does not care about american pseudo social justice, just do not call dark er skin „black“ and brighter skin „white“?
I mean still more people are afraid in the absence of light, hence the dark, than otherwise. And „white“ is often associated with clean, pure. There are psychological effects we can‘t just ignore.
Better just stop associating this pink skin with „white“ and darker skin with „brown“ or „black“.
I mean I still have to see a „white“ person and a „black“ person in real life.
For god‘s sake. Stop finding problems where there are none. Corporate trolling has reached the next level.
It is not only about colour but about racial identity.
This article describe this case:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jul/25/race-east-ja...
Other connotations of the word blacklist include the blacklisting of labor activists and of accused communists during our multiple bouts of anti communist hysteria. The word is charged with ugly meanings and there’s no reason to throw it around casually in a software project.
Somehow we have no issues with master/slave. Most people (except failed students and former party members) know communism was a really really shitty system. And most of the current racial issues are imported from america, during the democrats-vs-trump "battles", and are so americanized, that people forget minorities here (gypsies,...), and use BLM for maybe 10 black people that live here.
There are living people in USA who were around for the segregation.
Are there any documented cases of the word "master" offending anybody?
Using 'light' for 'good' which mostly derives from daylight, the sun, daytime etc. and darkness for 'bad' etc. might be the most ancient human metaphor, probably dating back to the time we could tell stories. Our first religion, in Egypt, the Sun was God and the God of the 'Dark Underworld' was the bad guy.
Moreover, it doesn't really have connotation with respect to skin colour.
The important, 'hard' part to social activism is context and nuance and also to understand that not all actions which may have some threadbare logic make sense or actually help.
However, I'm also somewhat annoyed by these kinds of changes, mostly because I would never have associated the "black" in blacklist with the skin colour until someone started pointing it out as an issue. While some terminology might be actually problematic, from my point of view there was never any problem with the word blacklist until someone started pointing it out. Now there is.
Once you make enough noise about an association like that, the association will certainly be there for more and more people even if it weren't there before. The problem kind of creates itself.
I'm fairly sure many Americans are understandably rather sensitive and sore about skin colour and racial justice right now. I'm not from the US, so depending on where you're from, this might make a difference in perspectives.
I'm also white and of the ethnic majority in my country, so I certainly don't see all the issues that minorities, immigrants or other ethnic groups might face. If it turned out that the word "blacklist" (to give an example) had been seen as an actual issue all along by a significant proportion of black people in my cultural environment or in most of the world, I wouldn't oppose the change. But if it hadn't been previously associated negatively that way, then creating that association and making a fuss about it has actually created a problem (or at least made one much bigger), not solved one.
While changing a term might not be that big of a thing practically, having to react to something you think shouldn't be an issue in the first place can be annoying out of principle. A social dynamic where you need to go along just because someone else sees a potential problem can also be annoying. My guess would be that the majority of people who are annoyed by these kind of changes are annoyed because of something along those lines.
Once you push something that sparks that kind of a reaction in people hard enough, you get people annoyed, and if you then push more, you get them more annoyed.
As for changing the culture, I'd rather like to see people getting much less neurotic about ethnicity and race rather than more so. I facepalmed hard when I read that, according to some people, the "ok" sign had become problematic because some far-right people had started using it, and that it should be avoided. I think that was an absurd stance; if you stop using an otherwise innocuous sign because someone else started using it for a bad purpose, you end up emphasize that new, bad association. (In that case you'd also kind of let the far-right people win, which makes it even more absurd, but that's not directly relevant here.)
The world is full of associations you can make, including ones with colour that matches someone's skin or religious symbol or any number of things. I've noticed that people are more prone to seeing connections, both in terms of reacting to actual ones as well as making less significant or spurious ones, when they feel more sensitive about related issues. It's no wonder if many (especially) Americans are currently trying to spot even the slightest racial issues and want to change the culture to get rid of them.
I'm just not sure I agree with that approach, or with the idea that it's "justice" or the only way to go. Rather than seeing a cultural change where we're so sensitive to racial issues that we try to see every potential negative connotation imaginable and get rid of them, I'm much prefer to see change towards a world where people don't feel the need to see all of those.
I really don't understand the endgame but I feel like a small group of people who would make wonderful evangelicals have grown up into the secular role of "solvers" of "racial issues".
I'm also not sure "Master password", "Primary password" or "Main password" are particularly intuitive. Probably better to name the resource like "Thunderbird account database password". Or just prompt to "Unlock password database".
Do you see the long list of substantive work done, in this underfunded open source project?
It was a one time bug and it might be caused by my IMAP provider, not Thunderbird, but still I'm worried. I keep almost all my emails, dating back to middle of 90s (although in different formats and accounts), and I would like to be 100% sure that all of them are intact. Now I don't have that peace of mind.
It's incredibly unlikely to be Thunderbird's fault.
It wasn't an overwritten message or IMAP bug, it was some corruption of the Thunderbird folder index.
The corruption bug likely lay with Thunderbird and not the IMAP server.
Anyone that cares about it, don't forget your donations.
At least for me own usage anything they've done since then is breaking plugins that I was using and adding new bugs. I've never seen a release where I thought that whatever they've added was useful.
I want to copy my emails automatically to a defined location without an addon.
Edit: after I wrote the above line, I realized that many people use closed source software... Well ok then.
I realize that many people take what the market offers.
https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/all/
If I go to the download page and download the Linux version, I end up with a Thunderbird 78 tarball. Not the 91 one.
See version 91 specific downloads for everyone: https://download-installer.cdn.mozilla.net/pub/thunderbird/r...
https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.mozilla.Thunderbird
I prefer tarballs for its simplicity and lack of dependency on 3rd party infrastructure.