[OT] Debian mailinglists [was: RE: Debian or Ubuntu?]

[Derek Broughton]

Mario Vukelic wrote:

> On Tue, 2008-05-20 at 15:32 -0300, Derek Broughton wrote:

> Or maybe 
> you make it look much simpler than it is by conflating nearly everything
> into "text". 

Agreed.  The point being that those other options _are_ simplistic.

> May I offer procmailrc as an example for something that 
> would probably be impossible to implement with a GUI configurator that
> should also check that the file really does what the user intended:
> http://www.gsp.com/cgi-bin/man.cgi?section=5&topic=procmailrc

Well, I'm not going to write the config tool right now (or probably ever - I
never liked procmail - though I was working on one for maildrop), but start
at the beginning - sooner or later every recipe has to deliver mail to a
file, pipe or program, or to another user.  It's simple to check that the
file/pipe/program exists.  Validating an email address is harder - do you
simply check that the format is good, or actually test SMTP?  Neither one
is impossible, though.  Now, I can conceive of a situation where I might
actually forward to an invalid SMTP address intentionally (expecting the
address to be created shortly) but then it's a matter of what procmail
would do with such an address when actually running - if procmail will
retry, it's just a warning, if procmail would drop it, it's an error.
 
> It's not so much about valid key=value pairs, it is about legitimate
> combinations of values.

The "If A then B" conditions.  In your example, procmail already checks
those, so why can't a config tool for procmailrc do the same?
-- 
derek