On Fri, Feb 20, 2004 at 04:00:34PM +0100, Andreas Aardal Hanssen wrote: > DjB software is, in a sense, great! It's reliable, it's secure, and it's > fairly easy to set up if you read the docs. But it is not intuitive in any > way. You _have to_ read the docs _completely_, and most admins learn the > hard way by guessing how it works, only to experience a complete disaster. > It's like the level of qmail guruism is proportional to how many times > you've messed up qmail ;-).
I've only messed up qmail once, the queue. But since I've read the docs and read the source I'm a guru anyway. :) His code is nice to read too. > Good design is crafted after the user. Absolutely. Agreed 100%. However, DJB doesn't make software for users, it's for administrators. And I'd hope that my administrator is able to handle it. :) (Many times he isn't, whoever he is, but then I'll hint him straight. :) > Ofcourse qmail admins back up their queues with "tar cfz ....", they I use dump. Everybody with ext2/3 should. :p > I'm blowing off steam here, because I believe strongly that very much of > the software DjB writes is designed perfectly technically, but it is > written for robots and not humans! It's written for computers. The administrator just has to know how to set it up, to be able to forget about it. Compared with the daily hassle of managing many other a software, I'll happily read DJB docs for a couple of hours. :) > Very many things in our world are very ridiculously badly designed! Yes. However, I think it's ok to compromise user friendliness if it buys you something more valuable. Just my 2 �re. :) //Peter
