ylee@csl.dl.nec.com (Ying-Da Lee) (04/25/91)
In article <129678@uunet.UU.NET> kyle@uunet.UU.NET (Kyle Jones) writes: >ylee@csl.dl.nec.com (Ying-Da Lee) writes: > > Why don't the basic principles of good programming > > apply in sendmail.cf? It IS programming, isn't it? > >You answered your own question. For most people it's not >programming at all--- more likely it's taking an existing >configuration, no matter how rotten that config file might be, >and tweaking it until things start working. This explains why >there are some many convoluted sendmail.cf files out there. Lots >can be simplified, but not without considerable work. Most >people would rather be doing just about anything else. But somebody have to write the sendmail.cf "templates" first, and that is programming. Even if we don't all want to do it ourselves, or perhaps especially since we don't all want to do it ourselves, we certainly want it to be clean, versatile efficient, and well-documented. If your sendmail accepts -d option, try doing /usr/lib/sendmail -bt -d21.30 0 user@abc.edu plus a few others of your favorite addresses. This gives you a rule-by-rule trace. I believe many people will be astounded by the volume of the output, and quite a few will notice lots of completely useless rules being applied over and over. I did it the first time soon after the thrill of having configured a working sendmail.cf, and it left me with no doubt that we deserve better. Ying-Da Lee (214)518-3490 C&C Software Development Lab NEC America (214)518-3990 (FAX) ylee@csl.dl.nec.com uunet!necbsd!ylee