Re: tlug: Re: djb [was: ibm.net with LINUX (Red Hat)]

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "Rex" == Rex Walters <rex@example.com> writes:

    Rex> On Thu, Aug 13, 1998 at 12:08:40AM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull
    Rex> wrote:

    Karl-Max> happens, common engineering practice tells us that it is
    Karl-Max> better to start a new design from the ground up and to
    Karl-Max> discard the old one. Which is exactly what djb did.

    >> And so did the guys who wrote smail, and the guy who wrote
    >> exim.  And the guys who created TrueType and NetBIOS and
    >> Windows NT.
    >> 
    >> Who among those got it right, and how can you tell by listening
    >> to them?

    Rex> Harrumph.  You don't tell by listening to the author's
    Rex> opinions.

You do if you've got crackers or email pirates in your machine and
that's all you've got to go on to choose the software to crush them
with.  But that was exactly my point.  Karl-Max said "Dan's right, the
old programs suck, the old protocols suck, and he built a new
mousetrap."  Well, that doesn't prove anything.  As you say, you have
to read the code.  And using non-standard idioms and subsystems makes
the code unreadable if you haven't got the time to learn the language.

In any case, I don't think _any_ of the examples I gave got it right.

But that's not the issue, at least not for my last post.  I am happy
to accept that it's worth looking at djb's stuff.  However, the issues 
now (as far as I'm concerned) are

1.  arrogance is costly (if I had anything except advice to
    contribute, I'd be a lot less arrogant and a lot more persuasive); 
    this is a minor theme, though 
2.  technical progress is not the be-all and end-all; there is such a
    thing as good enough, and in the real world you continue using
    systems that work---Karl mentioned "current requirements"; well, a 
    hacked smail satisfied my then-current requirements, and if I had
    screwed up the qmail config or the smail queue recovery, I would
    have been left with a half-dozen very peeved users
3.  in view of 2, backward compatibility is crucial

and I still don't see how QMTP can be both more forgiving and
contribute to greater reliability of the overall system (ie, the
internet).  Allow people to be sloppy, to code by example, to borrow
from reference implementations that may not be accurate reflections of 
the standard or may fail to handle important special cases---OK, the
QMTP link may stay up, but what if that stream simply gets cat'ed to
the next (non-QMTP) program?  (Been there, done that ;-)

    Rex> You tell by downloading, examining, using, analyzing, and
    Rex> comparing.  I believe qmail is more robust and secure than
    Rex> sendmail or exim because in my personal opinion it has a
    Rex> cleaner design and was better implemented (and, believe it or
    Rex> not, better documented).  NOT because of djb's .signatures or
    Rex> anyone else's stated opinion.

I would have taken _your_ opinion at the time (if it came with an
opinion that I had better than 4:1 odds that I could recover my smail
queues and not lose any mail).

    Rex> You mentioned Ed Yourdon.  Yourdon, Constantine, and Plauger
    Rex> have as much to do with my opinion of qmail as Dan Bernstein.

Ed Yourdon has nothing to do with my opinion of qmail (actually, I
don't have one, except that based on the information I could get at
the time qmail was too risky _for me_ to use).  I simply quoted him to
support the statement that legacy systems and legacy languages are
critically important in the Real World.

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