From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.2 (2018-09-13) on inbox.vuxu.org X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.0 required=5.0 tests=HEADER_FROM_DIFFERENT_DOMAINS, MAILING_LIST_MULTI,RCVD_IN_DNSWL_NONE autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.2 Received: from minnie.tuhs.org (minnie.tuhs.org [45.79.103.53]) by inbox.vuxu.org (OpenSMTPD) with ESMTP id bf1f02ab for ; Wed, 28 Nov 2018 00:11:21 +0000 (UTC) Received: by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix, from userid 112) id E6139A1CEF; Wed, 28 Nov 2018 10:11:20 +1000 (AEST) Received: from minnie.tuhs.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 605A3A1CE2; Wed, 28 Nov 2018 10:11:03 +1000 (AEST) Received: by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix, from userid 112) id 144E6A1CE2; Wed, 28 Nov 2018 10:11:02 +1000 (AEST) Received: from knecht.neophilic.com (knecht.neophilic.com [70.36.157.234]) by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 22DCEA1CE1 for ; Wed, 28 Nov 2018 10:10:59 +1000 (AEST) Received: from rieux.neophilic.com (rieux.neophilic.com [10.0.2.35]) (authenticated bits=0) by knecht.neophilic.com (8.15.2/8.15.2) with ESMTPSA id wAS0Ah6e085634 (version=TLSv1.2 cipher=ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256 bits=128 verify=NO); Tue, 27 Nov 2018 16:10:44 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from eric@neophilic.com) From: Eric Allman To: Jon Steinhart , tuhs@tuhs.org References: <201811160003.wAG03mlF139232@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> <20181116045016.GK3341@mcvoy.com> <7a632484-cdc7-7c59-7077-7a2c752045da@spamtrap.tnetconsulting.net> <4c36b2b2-76df-435f-27bc-e1feb0647f36@case.edu> <201811162113.wAGLDGiQ031455@darkstar.fourwinds.com> <201811191648.wAJGmqGd005247@darkstar.fourwinds.com> Openpgp: preference=signencrypt Autocrypt: addr=tuhs@eric.allman.name; prefer-encrypt=mutual; keydata= xsDiBDu8yuARBADuTa8bzS4Er9urm7XPu5vtrRRJMoY2/mvuQeRHpvHF6ncUF2ZC9nAkIYb6 Upl9UOCZxG6uwxzzzSnxeHg7aAVY/TEN4FukuN1X1aGvol/V8PM1nV5vyLFk/Tf/Q/yoN/w8 tK9dp/O2EflChD/i/J9vWIppg3rVKK6FPW4CuqqaiwCg/ytVY7yJHZCCrhRioLBtKaCGUB0D /20dzSKBUdOxSvfg3NKt7gojiqulxmNbRkkjuhbKMRiQ0jjt16L9h+zlS1mXNT91/Ds08WtF 99Z3YffTflcbU9uBea6AJhzIaYVHwCJsNyP+rGE+9CM1YZpwm5k/ZBr7iOr0tkI1o39JRg75 Ih18gnPVXovH+VhsXRGtxTqn7+dmBADmmsHL8u/qbBWKIC3TYpXH8rJBIJXHwvOrI4HbEvAh xzD/Zy6yGMgiTZ8quGHzmdm1kD53s/TVcgEo/XWlgy9Cr05tU16UGEx/Q38K4IetCTGjhOvY a0+I012p5ZK1KqnIjUuCAy7VgGy75sBPKzYeUjJ1yAO7+EMXaZP6Olejn80iRXJpYyBQLiBB bGxtYW4gPGVyaWNAU2VuZG1haWwuQ09NPsJOBBARAgAOBAsDAQICGQEFAju8yuEACgkQMRmA Uc8aTSwR/gCfcq/84OdF6e6hkUQQbVFPqsxS6N0An13gLkFVkPJrMs+5PK5ogl0k7yW8zsFN BDu8yuAQCAD2Qle3CH8IF3KiutapQvMF6PlTETlPtvFuuUs4INoBp1ajFOmPQFXz0AfGy0Op lK33TGSGSfgMg71l6RfUodNQ+PVZX9x2Uk89PY3bzpnhV5JZzf24rnRPxfx2vIPFRzBhznzJ Zv8V+bv9kV7HAarTW56NoKVyOtQa8L9GAFgr5fSI/VhOSdvNILSd5JEHNmszbDgNRR0PfIiz HHxbLY7288kjwEPwpVsYjY67VYy4XTjTNP18F1dDox0YbN4zISy1Kv884bEpQBgRjXyEpwpy 1obEAxnIByl6ypUM2Zafq9AKUJsCRtMIPWakXUGfnHy9iUsiGSa6q6Jew1XpMgs7AAICB/0d vsPKvMXcKls8RHeYcleBEQEgXovGaTNo8R3ZVjPcDUKcQbfWMP8w5qJKf36hvBsjEgfVJW7r lKUtA82H66ivnAgAqWZMgfROKSHwaTFScFWLR8lG5e7sd2OZ4xqDe6+BpYlmJocR2riughz8 B7p1RhINqpfslZ0QEdB/fscntjoBvohtjG80BwB/tB6gnWHsjd9Cv6QfiNYOzAWaQo+BmcFq kmTYwrXFFNWHjOWfCUyjg2kqztl0DHjmZ7AzgHgTEnPku2TlMXwaGbHZKDOwLP/dteywinK6 SEOW2HrQBMxkMQGEZWtOH6hjszJtkqn+V4O0c92d4FjaQhvleSL7wj8DBRg7vMrgMRmAUc8a TSwRAklEAJ44uotW5aUoI1uMu94xIkLeCI6iWACg1IbChgU5suH4a+T68hfH8Jwa140= Message-ID: Date: Tue, 27 Nov 2018 16:10:43 -0800 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.13; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/52.9.1 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <201811191648.wAJGmqGd005247@darkstar.fourwinds.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Language: en-US Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: [TUHS] man-page style X-BeenThere: tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.20 Precedence: list List-Id: The Unix Heritage Society mailing list List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: tuhs-bounces@minnie.tuhs.org Sender: "TUHS" [I sent this almost a week ago, but it never showed up, probably because my From address didn't match my subscription address. Apologies if this is a dup.] I confirm Jon's observation. It's true, sendmail wasn't "designed" in the waterfall model sense, because at the time the email world was a disaster, with new networks appearing seemingly daily, each of which seemed to feel a need to come up with a new syntax for addresses. Some of those syntaxes were left-associative and some right-associative, and there was no "correct" answer --- different sites wanted to parse the same email address differently. For example, consider: decvax!research!foo@berkeley If you're on decvax you should send this to research. If you're at Berkeley you should send this to decvax. And if you're on some other site with an ARPAnet connection but without UUCP, you should send it to Berkeley. I concluded that something arbitrarily flexible (which meant Turing Complete) was necessary. Also, since some sites didn't understand things like "@" signs in addresses, it was necessary to rewrite the header so "reply" would work. And all of this had to fit into a 16-bit address space. Life is easier today: the world has agreed on "user@domain", the multitude of networks (e.g., UUCP, DECnet, CSNet, Berknet, ChaosNet, PurdueNet, and possibly my favorite, a network out of the UK that used "user@domain" but with the domain reversed, e.g., eric@edu.berkeley.cs instead of eric@cs.berkeley.edu) is down to effectively one, and the only 16-bit machines out there are not-very-powerful microcontrollers. If I were building sendmail in this very different world, it would look very different. eric On 2018-11-19 08:48 , Jon Steinhart wrote: > Warner Losh writes: >> On Fri, Nov 16, 2018 at 2:40 PM Jon Steinhart wrote: >> >>> Emacs sort of >>> violates my UNIX-sense as it does many things instead of doing one thing >>> well. >> >> >> I'd argue that's not a bad thing. When people tried to add macros to make >> or sendmail, you wound up with crazy like imake or the crazy sendfile.m4 >> stuff. Of course, sendmail and one thing aren't mates, but sometimes you >> need to do a few, well chosen things well to avoid the crazy that trying to >> misuse something will bring to the table. >> >> Warner > > Funny that you bring this up as I was just talking to Eric about this. > I was telling him that someone had recently asked me why sendmail was > so complicated, and I explained to them that it was because email wasn't > always like it is today; that there were many disparate email systems and > sendmail glued them all together. Eric said something like yeah, and I > would have liked to have a better syntax but memory was too constrained > at the time to let me do anything better. >