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

[Derek Broughton]

Les Mikesell wrote:

> Derek Broughton wrote:
>> 
>> For instance, to configure postfix as
>> a smarthost, it needs to know your ISP's SMTP server name, port, and
>> authorization information.  When you enter those into a config tool, it
>> can open a connection to the server and test it.
> 
> First, remember that postscript 

postfix - I know even less about postscript...

> was written specifically to be easy to 
> configure so you are cherry-picking an example.  

If I was cherry picking, I'd have picked something I knew better.  Postfix
was somebody else's suggestion.

>> Why would I assume _it's_ wrong any
>> more than I would assume somebody screwed up the config in an editor?
> 
> You haven't been doing this very long, have you?   Wade through the bug
> history on a few large programs to catch up.  It's a pretty safe
> assumption that every program has bugs and it's just as easy to make a
> mistake in program source as a config file.

Of course there are bugs (and yes, I've been doing this for 30 years).  But
there's still a vastly smaller chance that there'd be a bug in a config
tool than that there'd be a mistake in a hand-edited file.

>> Sorry, that's an insane statement.  If I am editing a config file with an
>> editor, it's up to me to make sure changes are checked into version
>> control.
> 
> And that's a problem?  Why?

It's not - but you said it couldn't be done in a config tool.
> 
> Great, let me know when it's done.  And when it will match my version
> control system.

Why would it have to?  This is OSS - it would depend on the tools necessary
to do version control.  If I wrote it, I'd probably use svn.  If you liked
the tool, but not the version control, you'd modify it to handle your
preferred form of version control.

-- 
derek