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Posted Feb 3, 2011 5:06 UTC (Thu) by wahern (subscriber, #37304)
In reply to: Plain Text by HelloWorld
Parent article: LCA: Lessons from 30 years of Sendmail

What tools? Are you going to go the Mailman route, creating a hundred useless command line tools alongside a custom web-based configuration engine, sitting atop a complex database schema, possibly using a relational database backend? Almost every other option effectively boils down to that, and it's horrible.

The limitations of an ASCII configuration file is its virtue! Often times they turn into domain specific languages. In which case, use sendmail.cf as your north star and head south.

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Posted Feb 3, 2011 13:14 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (2 responses)

If you have to put things in a DB, at least make it sqlite. The sqlite command-line tool can be used to manipulate that in all sorts of ways if your tool is broken.

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Posted Feb 5, 2011 15:07 UTC (Sat) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] (1 responses)

Though the sqlite command-line interface is no way close in friedlyness to that of pgsql (or even the mysql one).

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Posted Feb 7, 2011 16:49 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Yeah, agreed. I was assuming 'zero dependencies', i.e. the sort of thing which might reasonably break in a situation in which 'all you have is vi'.