At 9:48 AM +1000 1/28/07, Joseph Armstrong wrote:
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Charles Marcus" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>To: "Questions and Answers for users of ASSP Anti-Spam SMTP Proxy"
><[email protected]>
>Sent: Sunday, January 28, 2007 8:41 AM
>Subject: Re: [Assp-user] Questions regarding code-quality and (in)securityof
>ASSP...
>
>
>[snip]
>>  I am beginning to agree, but I was able to get the guy who claimed to
>>  have looked at the code to be precise in his criticism. Now, below are
>>  two examples that jumped out at him that he is using to base his
>>  criticism of ASSP in general on. What he says SOUNDS reasonable, but
>>  since I am not a programmer, I don't know if it has technical merit or
>>  not.
>[snip]
>
>The person in question has given you a well defined answer in response to
>your question.
>They have validated their argument and with sound reasoning and with
>example.
>

And unless there's a specific reason not to provide a failover 
mechanism, if I were the programmer I'd probably say "thanks for 
pointing that out".

One of the reasons that open source code is so powerful a tool is 
that anyone can review it and make improvements.  It works best when 
there are many eyes involved, as the lone programmer typically 
doesn't do *everything* as elegantly as is theoretically possible. 
The person in question has made a specific code improving suggestion, 
and it probably would be a good idea to implement such protections in 
general as ASSP moves forward.

On the other hand (and in no way negating the validity of the 
specific example), ASSP works, and works well.  It's not all 
band-aids and duct tape under the hood, as with some projects I've 
seen.  That the above example hasn't been the source of lots of 
trouble points to the solidity of the programming in general. One 
programming imperfection does not necessarily mean that the rest of 
the code is "horribly broken".  If the program crashed because of 
this it would be "horribly broken".  It doesn't.  It may not be 
perfect, college programming class A+ textbook material, but some 
times in the real world that doesn't matter as much as getting the 
job done.

-- 
Bill Christensen
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