This article is pathologically sick. Couldn't read it any more, to painful.
qmail gives you pain, too. It is completly useless without applying patches, which are mostly of poor quality. And it misleads you to do most unperformant things around it. Like writing shellscripts which fork() like hell for every mail there is to process.
D. J. Bernstein
31–40 of 121 posts
Re: D. J. Bernstein
#32I was with Aaron until
> What other field combines all these arts? Language, math, art, design, function. Programming is clearly in a class of its own. And, when it comes to programmers, who even competes with djb? Who else has worked to realize these amazing possibilities? Who else even knows they are there?
Is this satire?
Re: D. J. Bernstein
#33the best programmer is the person who have made the biggest difference in people's lives.
it's not measured by the no. of lines of code, bugs,etc.
Re: D. J. Bernstein
#34There are several less known project with really passionate coding, especially http://nginx.net/.
postfix, sqlite and many other projects could be compared with qmail.
Re: D. J. Bernstein
#35"One bug — one bug! — was found in qmail." While this is certainly impressive, the number of bugs is not a good metric for measuring the effectiveness of a programmer. A programmer is only as good as the business problems she solves. One bug in a life-critical application could be catastrophic. On the other hand, a programmer that makes sure their code is completely bug-free would not do well in a domain where time-t…
[deleted]
Re: D. J. Bernstein
#36"One bug — one bug! — was found in qmail." While this is certainly impressive, the number of bugs is not a good metric for measuring the effectiveness of a programmer. A programmer is only as good as the business problems she solves. One bug in a life-critical application could be catastrophic. On the other hand, a programmer that makes sure their code is completely bug-free would not do well in a domain where time-t…
Also, the number is at least four bugs. http://cr.yp.to/qmail/qmailsec-20071101.pdf
and this is about just security bugs. All the other bugs are not counted.
Re: D. J. Bernstein
#37I have dealt with qmail for ten years. It is a complete joy once you have it up and running. You literally can stop thinking about it because it always works. However, getting it up and running requires adding in antispam, antivirus, virtual mailboxes, some additional protective and administrative patches, some extra stuff for SMTP-AUTH, SSL/TLS, reporting, and perhaps a few more patches for fun. Patches, you say? We…
If code I write is hard to deploy to your system, I don't think my code can be to blame. Rather, it's the fault of the system/language in which we are working.
I hate this attitude. If your code targets my system, I should be able to install it without editing it.
Re: D. J. Bernstein
#38Not to forget daemontools.
I was surprised and looked him up on wikipedia -- he did indeed write daemontools.
daemontools and tinydns are far, far better examples of brilliance than qmail, in my opinion. Especially tinydns comes far closer to meeting modern needs than qmail, for its domain. I'll never go back to the horror of bind config files.
Re: D. J. Bernstein
#39who cares?
Re: D. J. Bernstein
#40I love djb and his tools but, as someone who hacked djbdns extensively for a research project, I think the project misses empathy for other programmers. It's hard to follow, poorly documented, and too clever sometimes. That said, if we judge code only on performance, then yeah it's rock solid.