Re: transports directory

[Nicholas_Briggs.PARC@xerox.com]

I haven't had any router crashes since I added code to detect loops in DNS
CNAME entries and MX entries.

I think that ZMailer's advantage over Sendmail is that its configuration
language (zmsh) is easier to read and write than Sendmail's -- and Sendmail's
wasn't particularly well documented (and you couldn't necessarily easily get
the source for the version of Sendmail you were running).   Now people are
publishing real books on Sendmail.  If there were accurate documentation on
some stable version of ZMailer i'd be very happy.

I can't, in all conscience, tell some sysadmin who has never configured a
mailer before "here's ZMailer; go figure what local changes you need, oh, and
by the way, there's no accurate documentation -- just read the source".   I CAN
tell them, "go buy the Sendmail book by XXX, and don't you dare send me any
mail with hostnames visible or non-FQDNs"

I think the design of the scheduler is actually fairly simple.  There are some
complicated data-structures (which are not well documented in the code), but
overall the design has some elegance.   Again, documentation would be the most
useful.

If I had the time to do a rewrite (I don't!) i'd start with a specification of
what it was supposed to do, then how it was supposed to do it (maintainers
documentation), then the reference manuals, then the code, and then update the
manuals to be accurate.

Re: "I think that this was covered in CS 201!  :)  I think I can manage..."

I didn't mean to offend -- there are a lot of people who have never taken CS201
:-(.  [Which is why Sun is starting to teach courses on "how to write
multithreaded applications".]

					\nick