[Info-vax] openvms and xterm

[Dan Cross]

In article <v05omg$cnu$1 at panix2.panix.com>,
Scott Dorsey <kludge at panix.com> wrote:
>Dan Cross <cross at spitfire.i.gajendra.net> wrote:
>>
>>Sendmail.cf was hardly typical of most Unix configuration files,
>>but surely you already know that.  Indeed, I think one could
>>make a strong argument that sendmail's design, not to mention
>>its configuration, wasn't very Unix-y at all.  At this point, I
>>imagine that Eric would agree.
>
>This is true although the extensive use of regexps and rewrite rules is
>very Unixlike.  

Is it?  Did sendmail really make much use of regular expressions
for example?  The production rules are related, but dissimilar.
The closest seems like the state-driven tokenization code in the
address parser, but I don't think it actually implements
generalized regular expressions.  Perhaps it would have been
cleaner if it had.

>Sendmail was a thing that started out clean and small and accreted more and
>more crap as time went by, until it got to the point where it just was not
>really much good anymore.  And then it got replaced (for the most part) by
>more modular and maintainable systems.

Yup.  The problem got harder and harder, too.

>>But a fair counter argument to the "but it's not Unix!" cries is
>>that Unix lacked a robust configuration language that was
>>ubiquitous across systems and packages.  That was a bit of a
>>shame, but perhaps inevitable: some programs had very domain
>>specific requirements for configuration that would be difficult
>>to express in a generic configuration language (lookin' at you,
>>sendmail).  Surely any given universal language would either be
>>insufficient to express the full generality required for all
>>use cases, or it would be too baroque for simple, common cases.
>
>This is true, although with JSON things are changing a bit.

Eh, JSON has its own problems; since the representation of
numbers is specified to be compatible with floats, it's possible
to lose data by translating it through JSON (I've seen people
put e.g. machine addresses in JSON and then be surprised when
the low bits disappear: floating point representations are not
exact over the range of 64-bit integers!).

>>Anyway.  I can get behind the idea that modern service
>>management is essential for server operation.  But it doesn't
>>follow that the expression of that concept in systemd is a great
>>example of how to do it.
>
>IF you believe this, and I am not sure that I do, then it seems to me
>that the Solaris approach is far, far better than the systemd approach.
>Certainly a good argument can be made for service management and there are
>certainly some systems where it is a good idea, but that does not mean
>that systemd is a good idea.

100%.  I'd prefer something like Solaris's SMF to systemd,
though hopefully with something nicer than XML for configuration
files.

	- Dan C.