[Gllug] is this a big problem?

[Nix]

On Tue, 23 Aug 2005, Peter Childs yowled:
>     Aggreed I use exim. Advantage I spose is that its british.

... with a very responsive author (although Eric Allman is hardly
Mr. Nasty either: MTAs seem to attract Nice Guys. Mostly.)

>     The reason is that both Postfix and exim have ascii based config
> rather than sendmail which is based in m4 a very strange language.

I *wish* it was M4-based: the actual configuration file is far more
insane than that, sort of what happens to a regexp matcher after it
meets Cthulhu.

M4 is actually quite easy to get to grips with, and it's quite possible
to write things in it (note that autoconf, for example, is mostly
implemented in M4 with a couple of helper perl scripts). It's a
full-blown language, and with the m4sugar library to provide things like
loops and conditionals (that people seem to expect for some reason) is
actually quite usable and useful if you want to do really complex
textual mangling, particularly if the mangling involves pasting lots of
little prewritten pieces together. Sort of like, well, autoconf. :)

-- 
`... published last year in a limited edition... In one of the
 great tragedies of publishing, it was not a limited enough edition
 and so I have read it.' --- James Nicoll
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