19 Nov
2018
19 Nov
'18
5:48 p.m.
Warner Losh writes:
On Fri, Nov 16, 2018 at 2:40 PM Jon Steinhart
<jon(a)fourwinds.com> wrote:
Funny that you bring this up as I was just talking to Eric about this.
I was telling him that someone had recently asked me why sendmail was
so complicated, and I explained to them that it was because email wasn't
always like it is today; that there were many disparate email systems and
sendmail glued them all together. Eric said something like yeah, and I
would have liked to have a better syntax but memory was too constrained
at the time to let me do anything better.
Emacs sort of
violates my UNIX-sense as it does many things instead of doing one thing
well.
I'd argue that's not a bad thing. When people tried to add macros to make
or sendmail, you wound up with crazy like imake or the crazy sendfile.m4
stuff. Of course, sendmail and one thing aren't mates, but sometimes you
need to do a few, well chosen things well to avoid the crazy that trying to
misuse something will bring to the table.
Warner