Subject: Re: Plausibility of sendmail?
From: Brian Dessent <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 02 Feb 2004 06:33:56 -0800

[email-masked] wrote:

> Seems to me you have not worked for many Fortune 500 size organizations -
> where almost ALL your hardware and software purchasing decisions are made
> by folks who *PRIDE* themselves on their *LACK* of technical expertise - as
> if such were somehow evidence of their inability to *MANAGE*. In fact,
> being a technical guru can often be career death in such places as the
> *can't do's* endlessly convince themselves that the *can do's* can't
> "manage  people". Which begs the question - "WHAT DOES CHOOSING HARDWARE
> HAVE TO DO WITH *MANAGING PEOPLE*????????" But they do it anyway. And of
> course when such *beings* make such decisions, they do so with assumptions
> like "all open source is BAD" (while their web servers are running Apache),
> and the CHEAPEST thing is *GOOD* - Intel rather than Sun or HP. Oh, but we
> can't run Linux because that's *bad* *unsupported* open source!!

Yes, PHB types can make really terrible decisions.  That doesn't mean
that because they're in charge those plans should become feasible, just
because "that's what the bossman wants."  My statement was only that
"you'd be much better served..." with a native posix OS, especially
where security and performance are required such as in a busy mail
server in the DMZ.

> enviroment - enter CYGWIN. Of course it's *bad* open source, but now the
> *manager* has promised his/her management that this new functionality would
> be ready by week's end - without consulting the guru's first. So cygwin is
> agreed to as a *temporary* solution (with the understanding that temporary
> in such organizations could be two decades instead of three).
> 
> This is how a need for something like sendmail on cygwin could conceivably
> come about - happens ALL the time.

If someone is crazy enough to want a production mailserver with Cygwin,
let them run Exim.  I guess my point was more that "sendmail is an old,
crufty, impossible to comprehend pile of rotten bits" and not "Cygwin
shouldn't have MTA packages available because it's unsuitable for
production use."  In other words, I view anything that could hasten
(even if infinitesimally) the demise of sendmail as a feature and not a
bug.

Brian

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