| |||||||||||||
Plain TextPlain TextPosted Feb 2, 2011 22:49 UTC (Wed) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129)In reply to: Plain Text by jeremiah Parent article: LCA: Lessons from 30 years of Sendmail
But I continue to resist the urge because damnit! Sometimes all you have is vi.Yes, sometimes. And in the remaining 95% of all cases, you have all the necessary tools at your disposal and cripple yourself by not using them. Sounds like a wonderful tradeoff to me.
(Log in to post comments)
Plain Text Posted Feb 2, 2011 23:13 UTC (Wed) by jeremiah (subscriber, #1221) [Link]
In this case, were talking remote Linux boxes on non-broad-band connections. So seriously vi is all we have sometimes. Doesn't mean I don't also have a nice GUI front end to things, when it's an option. Things are also written so that the data can be stored in a DB if the admin chooses. But the default is to assume we are in a worst case scenario, until proven otherwise. Also makes it lighter weight. Of course there is Berkley DB which is pretty light. Awe who knows. There's never a single correct solution for everyone, all you can do is make a lot of things optional, and spend a lot of time thinking about what the best defaults are for the majority of people.
Plain Text Posted Feb 3, 2011 17:34 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]
psql is probably even less latency-sensitive than vi (being based on readline and stdout), and is at least as good at making controlled modifications to structured data. It's not so good at changing one character in a long string in a single field, but it's great when the granularity of the database matches the granularity of the data.
Plain Text Posted Feb 3, 2011 5:06 UTC (Thu) by wahern (subscriber, #37304) [Link]
What tools? Are you going to go the Mailman route, creating a hundred useless command line tools alongside a custom web-based configuration engine, sitting atop a complex database schema, possibly using a relational database backend? Almost every other option effectively boils down to that, and it's horrible.
The limitations of an ASCII configuration file is its virtue! Often times they turn into domain specific languages. In which case, use sendmail.cf as your north star and head south.
Plain Text Posted Feb 3, 2011 13:14 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
If you have to put things in a DB, at least make it sqlite. The sqlite command-line tool can be used to manipulate that in all sorts of ways if your tool is broken.
Plain Text Posted Feb 5, 2011 15:07 UTC (Sat) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]
Though the sqlite command-line interface is no way close in friedlyness to that of pgsql (or even the mysql one).
Plain Text Posted Feb 7, 2011 16:49 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Yeah, agreed. I was assuming 'zero dependencies', i.e. the sort of thing which might reasonably break in a situation in which 'all you have is vi'.
|
|||||||||||||