al_form2000

How is this superior to <any_other_http_based_storage_engine_with_API>?

I find this trend of applications packing their own resolver concerning. If nothing else, it widens greatly the attack surface to name resolution. I also foresee mayhem with perimeter firewalls and stuff. It should be possible to block this at the OS level.

> I'm afraid I've lost the metaphor

Then you should be way more careful, sir. Lost metaphors are seldom returned, in these uncivilized times.

It was in fact a very popular concept in Victorian England.

Not only that, now we obviously have reliable sources to turn to to get the right opinion about stuff. O brave new world.

And everybody can speak about anything. As long as they don't care being hounded by the neo-puritan prudes and lose job, career, social standing.

Nathaniel Hawthorn raising.

You are reading it with the bias you mention, and, as a consequence, you are attaching overbroad significance to a sentence that weighs in at about 3% of a text dedicated to the discussion of an archaelogical atlas of Ancient Rome.

Yeah, that's the folk wisdom on sendmail. But really, since version 8.0, writing your own .cf (or reading it) should have been regarded as bizarre as crafting your own object files with an hex editor. And sendmail has served me well, over the years; its scariest feature (sendmail.cf) is also a strength - as a Turing complete programmiong language, it allows you to tie your incoming/outgoing mail in square knots, if you feel so inclined, or to solve some unforeseen mail routing configuration/problem/whatever. Of course, if you find someone that has gone to the lenght to write a _LOCAL ruleset that does it - and alas that is a creaft I do not possess, and is dying out. When it does, I will probably make the postfix jump.

I cannot claim prescience, because I started ont the trade when sendmail was THE mail program (though ed was no longer THE text editor): but consider, had I listened to the sendmail bashing crowd a couple years later I would have gone qmail (!!!). For not having done that, I thank the almighty weekly.

Which gets it apparently wrong, as bash executes the *profile stuff on interactive login shells also.

Also because doing the same thing over and over again "[because X for X in (consistency, security, esthetics, whatchamacallit)]" grows old fast - and by the time it's been fixed and running again, X is no longer there, or it's been totallty twisted out of the intended shape.

Character encodings using shift/unshift bytes were born out of serial transmission.

... Also check out those ^Zs at EOF, will ya.

Been a sysadmin for 25 years myself.

Suppose I wrote an article headlined "Being a DBA is not hard" and gave "dnf install mysql-server && systemctl enable mysqld" as proof.

TFA is on par with this.

I was the ISP, & they had BL'd one of my servers for delivering NDRs. They used to blacklist /16 netblocks wholesale for this kind of, "sins", and demand ransom for getting out.

Past (more than 5 years ago as I reckon) is when I locked horns with them. They may have switched policies, I may have gotten smarter than them, who knows.

No, it does not. Read the thread to know why.

On redhat derived systems, setting up a basic mailserver was never harder (post 2010) than service "sendmail start & & service dovecot start" + adding a couple of DNS records. Not knowing this means not having done one's homework. Which is also a good indication that one should not be messing with email.

And knowing it is still being long way from running an effective mail server.

The config format is the least of your worries also if you're running sendmail - which I do.

In short, no.

UCEPROTECT was the pits and its operators were unprincipled lowlifes. Luckily they (like all the pay-to-delist BLs) never got more than minimal traction, so ignoring them and their BS mostly worked ('course you needed a /19 to be effective at doing that)

TFA is so wrong on so many levels, I do not even know where to begin with. It surely does not make me want to rush to test the author's MTA.

Unless he's talking of a one mailbox server, accepting outgoing only from localhost and somehow endowed with a non residential ip (or good luck with rdns, rbls, etc.). But that was always trivial, post UUCP era.

Background: I've been running mail servers from 1996, several different MTAs, for my company and for customers. Getting the thing up and running is not (very) hard -for a primary MX net facing machine. That's where work begins though.

My primary MTA is still sendmail, and sendmail.cf was never one of my problems - I do not have a degree in compilers, whatever that is, and surely I never read sendmail.cf

I intensely dislike yaml's whitespace-based syntax because whitespace is white, and it gives very little visual context expecially in long, nested documents. Editors that expand/collapse branches do help some, but are no match for highlighting matching pair of braces in other saner formats/languages (I am also not a fan of syntactic whitespace in python, if you get my drift.)

And ansible's parser is broken, in more ways that I can remember (haven't been writing playbooks and stuff for a couple of months now). If you like pointless pain, try embedding ":" in task names for a demo (or one of other several "meta" characters: the colon is just the one that ends to recur most).

I will give a passing mention to the smug, vague error message "You have an error at position (somewhere in the middle of the file) It seems that you are missing... (something) we may be wrong (they almost always are) but it appears it begins in position (some position close to the first line)" that sets off a hunt for the missing brace/colon/space/whatever and makes me want to do stuff to the person who devised it.

This compounds with the confusion brought on weaving of yaml's and jinjia2 syntaxes and ansible's own flakiness on deciding what is evaluated when - which decides when and if a variable does indeed change, when does yes means "yes" rather than true or 1, but not '1' or "true" (try prompting the user for a boolean variable, and find yourself writing if ( (switch == "true") or (switch == "1")) in short order).

Pity that ansible is so damn convenient, or I would have ditched it long time ago for anything - bash included (OK, maybe not bash).

Hate to nitpick, but 'deont' in deontology does not come from the (latin) root "deus', rather from the Greek root 'deont' - that which pertains to duty.

The halting problem bit is a shower thought with no supporting evidence whatsoever, so your complexity lowering scenario may well be doable. However, paring complexity is a strictly developer-side measure of goodness (that is assuming that the low complexity result is still readable, maintainable...) - we can agree that reducing bugs is also a very good user side metric, but that tells only a (little) part of the story.

In my experience, developer-side evaluation has a very low impact (I was about to write: zero) on the perceived and actual goodness of the software itself. Which is tied mostly to factors such as user experience, fit to the problem it was designed for and to the organization(s) it is going to live in (user experience again). These properties do not strike me as amenable to algorithmic improvement, no more than "pleasant body lines and world class interiors" in the original car analogy. But they are a (big) part of good software design, besides being the 'raison d'etre' of the darned thing to begin with.

But let's forget cars, as hard as it is. Few months ago HN was running the story about developing software in Oracle. Now, Oracle may be by now a little soft around the edges, but I think that most would agree that it has been setting the standard for (R)DBMS for decades. Success may not on itself be the tell-all measure of software goodness, but the number of businesses that have been willing to stake the survival of their data on Oracle is surely a measure of its perceived goodness (as that other elusive factor - hipness - tends not to be paramount in the DBMSs business).

The development side story, taken as face value, was pure horror (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941). Everything in it spoke bad, outdated, rotting design. The place must be teeming with ideas on how to improve just about everything in that environment. And yet if that came to be, maybe by some nifty edge pruning algorithm, it would do nothing to improved the goodness-to-the-world measure of the software, not until the internals' improvement translated to observables in the user base experience.That type of improvements will still require vaste amount of non-algorithmic design and, in the meantime, a very concrete risk will be run of deteriorating the overall user experience (because ehi, snafus will happen).

This (internals are just a small part of the story) is one of the reasons why so many reimplementations I have seen failed ("ehi, let's rewrite this piece of shit and make it awesome") and the reason because everyone resists the move from IPV4 to IPV6. I could think of many more examples.

We know a great deal about dynamics,kinematics, thermodynamics and generally the physics that governs car components, yet we are a long way from an algorithm that applied to a car will produce a better car. My guess is that doing that for software is as hard, if not harder.

Also the sentence 'algorithms that applied to algorithms produce a better model' has a strong smell of halting problem, at least to this nose.

Thumbs up.

And terrible it is indeed, but I cannot find it specified - the strings eval, exec, command, statement do not even occur in the official specs (shallow doc perusal, I know)

This is not going to make you many friends in the server community (think apache, mysql...)

As an ansible user, I hate YAML and its broken parsers with a passion, but the security objection does not make much sense. It does apply verbatim to any parser of anything if the implementation decides that a given label means "eval this content right away". I fail to see how this can be a fault of the DDL rather than the parser's.