Re: [TUHS] man-page style

I sat down to my first TCP/IP connected host around 1985, and the first thing I wanted to do was to configure my first non-UUCP email machine. After an hour of wading through sendmail’s state machines, I gave up wondering why it had to be so hard. In the amazing 184 BSTJ, Dave Presotto had described upas, the replacement he built for sendmail. I loved its ease of use, and it was one of the reasons I wanted to join 1127, which I did in late 1987. I supported email and upas for a number of years, including the {bitnet | csnet | uucp | acsnet(?)} -> domain migration. Like the proverbial (and non-existent) boiling frog, this crept up on me: it was a mild surprise to realize we were using the other stuff much any more. Aside from configuration issues, the main complaint with sendmail was that it was a huge program running as root, with intentional and unintentional holes in. For many years it was a steady source of security problems, including its use in the Morris worm. That said, sendmail is still running, and handling a fair amount of mail, I believe. A few years ago I checked for recent security problems and found none reported. I think this is a case of “software annealing”: if you don’t change the specs much, and keep working on it, you will eventually get most of the bugs. As for the configuration: when Norman Wilson moved to Toronto, he implemented some form of little language for configuring sendmail, treating it somewhat as an assembly language. I don’t know the details, but they might be of interest.