Re: the qmail pictures (fwd)

[Dean Gaudet <dg...@arctic.org>]

Comments from a user.  You all can guess I completely agree with his
comment about the config language.

Dean

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 28 Sep 1997 23:30:31 EDT
From: Scott Schwartz <sc...@finch.cse.psu.edu>
To: Dean Gaudet <dg...@arctic.org>
Subject: Re: the qmail pictures 

Dean Gaudet <dg...@arctic.org> writes:
| I never argued it wasn't.  Like I said, I just want to know what specific
| concerns people have with Apache.  If we don't know the concerns then how
| can we ever hope to address them?  For example, why do *you* not trust
| apache enough to warrant it?

Well, for one thing, Apache uses libc and the char* based string
libraries.  As long as you are going to write a big complicated
program, you ought to start by avoiding that problem altogether.  Qmail
proves you can be smaller and more efficient by adopting superior
programming methodology.

But what counts as specific?  It's too big and too complicated. It's
too hard to read and understand the source.  The configuration stuff is
too complicated, and uses yet another wierd syntax.  You say you know
this.  So fix it!  I'm sure there's a rationale for all of those bad
things, but that's no excuse.  Even worse, giving you a list of details
to tweak works against my main complaint.  Start deleting things, not
tweaking them or adding more!

My idea of a good design?  Plexus.  It is much smaller and easier to
understand and the perl runtime system is inherently safer then raw
libc.