Re: Goals for 1.3?
winni@xpilot.org (Winfried Truemper) wrote on 24.12.96 in <[🔎] Pine.LNX.3.95.961224144315.22478D-100000@www.shop.de>:
> On Mon, 23 Dec 1996, Bruce Perens wrote:
>
> > A decade or so ago someone thought exactly this way. He decided that
> > configuration files were not changed often, but they are parsed all of
> > the time. Thus he set his first priority at making them fast to parse,
> > and made ease of configuration a lower priority. The result was the
> > sendmail configuration file language. When I met that programmer years
> > later, he was _still_ apologizing for inflicting that disaster on us.
>
> My impression of "sendmail.cf" is that it's much too big ...
> "overfeatured". The language itself is not complicated:
>
> # file containing names of hosts for which we receive email
> Fw/etc/mail/sendmail.cw
Of course, you just picked out the easy parts. Look at the sendmail rules
(all the $ * ( ) etc stuff) to understand what people are upset about. (To
compare to a traditional language: you're trying to judge the language by
only looking at it's declarations. Have a look at the statements and
control structures!)
Yes, _these days_, this stuff is usually generated automatically. It
didn't quite start out that way. I did a .cf from scratch some years ago,
since even the distributed examples had serious problems. I think that
understanding and writing together took me about the equivalent of two or
three full-time working days - and I needed a _simple_ (IP only) setup!
These days, I'm using smail (and maybe exim some day). Smail configs look
pretty much like what I thought back then I'd want mailer configs to look
like.
> If we would organize all parameters from shell-scripts into one big file
> (the main database), we would end up like sendmail: with a monolithic
> config file. Difficult to survey.
Not necessarily. You can make big files easy to understand - choose the
syntax wisely. If, for example, you combined the typical win .ini files
with a way to automatically keep documentation near the settings, that one
might be quite usable. (Of course, it would still remind people of win
.ini files, so don't use [xxx] to mark sections ;-))
MfG Kai
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