Tim Cutts writes:
On 15 Jul 2022, at 17:15, Dave McGuire <mcguire@neurotica.com> wrote:
The all-time winner has to be amavisd. A configuration file that's actually a Perl script? Come ON.
Aside: Mailman resembles that remark, except that it's not even consistent about using Python modules (close enough to script), there's also some .ini (at least for builds) and even ZCML hanging around!
I am loving this thread, even though it’s somewhat irrelevant to Mailman3! It’s made me laugh out loud a couple of time!
Yes!
Sendmail was hateful. I moved to exim in its very early days (about 1996) purely because its config file was so easy to understand
Yeah, I did the same except it was Smail in 1995, and a few months later the computer committee hauled me in because Smail allowed me to *configure* refuse-to-relay but didn't actually implement it until about 3 days after the dressing-down. :-D
Postfix configs are nice for simple cases, but rapidly become impenetrable once you add milters, mailing lists, DKIM and whatnot.
That's interesting that you say that, because I'm running Exim4 out of Debian packaging, using "conf.d" organization and the update-update-conf (IIRC) script to turn that back into the monolith that Exim expects. I've found I can generally keep my Mailman configs to about 3 files (one for sitewide #defines, one for routing, one for transport) but it makes me nervous about how it interacts with the rest of the system. The monolith, of course, is unreadable and order-dependent....
I guess that just comes with the territory, mail routing *is* complex.