Re: Linuxconf

[Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au>]

On Tue, 2 Jun 1998, Rev. Joseph Carter wrote:

> > RE: sendmail.cf
> > 
> > IMO, linuxconf should manage sendmail.mc rather than sendmail.cf. 
> 
> That would be more reasonable, however not all that sendmail can do is
> supported with the m4 rules and such.  Not at the moment at least.

anything you can do in sendmail.cf can also be done in sendmail.mc. you
can put any sendmail rulesets you like in the m4 file.

sendmail.mc is actually a very good example of a template-style
configuration tool.  it greatly increases the ease-of-use, WITHOUT losing
*any* of the flexibility and power of the previous "arcane" way of
configuring sendmail.


> Sendmail is their selling point because of how complex it is, how
> little m4 helps and how much they can do with it.  The motivation for
> the project is that sendmail if easy to configure could sell linux and
> the opensource paradigm to a few people.  This is good.

but sendmail is already trivial to configure using the m4 macros, for
nearly all common setups.

the only time you need to hack sendmail rulesets manually is when you're
doing something truly weird / non-standard with sendmail.  The m4 macros
cover just about any configuration requirement you could think of.

> The solution of course is to extend the m4 stuff to support all the
> things linuxconf does, but that's not so easy.

no, the solution would be to make linuxconf a front-end for the m4 stuff
rather than mess with sendmail.cf directly.

whoever wrote the sendmail module for linuxconf should take a good look
at debian's sendmailconfig script and see what can be done using just
a shell script. it asks a dozen or so simple questions and uses the
answers (with sensible defaults) to build a sendmail.mc file, which is
then piped into m4 to produce sendmail.cf.


> Also, note that slackware didn't at last look have m4 sendmailconfig.
> Another example of where slackware is doing more harm than good these
> days by not adopting things the rest of the world has... =p

IMO, slackware doesn't matter....it's a zombie OS (dead as a dodo, but
just doesn't realise it yet).


craig

--
craig sanders