Re: [9fans] alright, this should be interesting

[Jason Gurtz <jason@tommyk.com>]

On 10/22/2004 03:12, Dave Lukes wrote:

>>>Most users in the world don't see the code, and don't care
>>>about it's uglyness. They care whether something works and is
>>>easy to use.
>>>    
>>>
> ... and interestingly, speaking as an SA, NEITHER DO THE SAs!
> They are users too:

OTOH, sometimes clean src is--at least to this SA--a good thing.  ...like
the time I was investigating why sendmail (w/ strict helo checking turned
on) was rejecting a certain Tektronix printer we have.  Turns out the
buggy MFer (they would not fix this!) was saying

    helo myDomain.com\n
space char-------------^

instead of

    helo mydomain.com\n

What I found, at least in the case of sendmail-8.12.x (and taking into
account my haltingly poor grasp of anything more than elementary C :), was
that it wasn't too hard to take this particular case into account and
still turn away the more egregiously broken SMTP engines of certain
malware.  Surely there must be cases like this in kernel land too?

~Jason

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