On Fri, 20 Feb 2004, Peter Stuge wrote:
>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.
I've worked a lot with qmail, did loads of modifications to it to have it
work with needs of my employer, and have to say that I have something of
the opposite experience. I messed up qmail quite a lot ;-), but have
learned to respect it for what it is: the only practically bug-free, most
reliable and secure MTA out there.
But this is what I see when trying to read qmail source:
stralloc nughde = {0};
if (!stralloc_copys(&nughde,"")) _exit(QLX_NOMEM);
nughde_get(r);
For those of us who know what "nughde" is, and what "stralloc" is, this is
fine. But for most others, it's enough to go get nuts. Passing what seems
to be a copy of a stralloc struct to a void function which takes a (char
*) doesn't make sense. Does it modify my nughde? Probably. What does it
do, anyway?
One ends up having to read every single line of nughde_get to understand
what it does. It's very old-school.
>> 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. :)
With "user" I do mean "administrator". And I do understand what you're
saying; the software does what it should when it should if the admin does
it all right. If only DjB didn't place that big red button labeled "Do not
push this button!" everywhere. ;-) hehe.
>> Ofcourse qmail admins back up their queues with "tar cfz ....", they
>I use dump. Everybody with ext2/3 should. :p
But this doesn't work when upgrading to a different disk, when using LVM,
changing file systems, or when there is other data than the queue on the
same partition, but you only want to recover the queue.
>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. :)
By all means; I also choose qmail because I know it. But recommending it
to other experienced admins is hard, because they enjoy making
modifications, and ask questions about queue recovery and backup.
>> 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. :)
Here's my counter argument ;-). One does not have to come at the cost of
the other. An infinitely advanced IMAP server should not immediately be
infinitely impossible to install, configure, maintain and modify.
Andy :-)
--
Andreas Aardal Hanssen | http://www.andreas.hanssen.name/gpg
Author of Binc IMAP | "It is better not to do something
http://www.bincimap.org/ | than to do it poorly."
