On Friday, 3 April 2020 20:48:12 BST Grant Taylor wrote: > On 4/2/20 10:47 PM, Caveman Al Toraboran wrote: > > wow, didn't know sendmail's syntax was so hard it needed a compiler > > > > :D thank you very much for your help. highly appreciated. > > I think that's an inaccurate statement. > > First, m4 is a macro package, not a compiler. > > Second, the macros are used to reduce the size of the macro config (mc) > file to something manageable instead of hundreds of lines that are easy > to cause a syntax mistake. > > Third, the macros made the mc file more semantics in nature instead of > Sendmail config file (cf) specific. Meaning that one line allows > changing values in multiple places that use the common information, like > the domain name(s). > > My home system has a 33 line mc file (including comments) that expands > to 1915 lines of cf file (including comments). > > Both the input and output is ASCII text. Humans can read both of them. > Humans that understand cf syntax can read both files. > > This is far from turning something into byte code.
I have used sendmail in the past and found it a pain to get my head around some of its more esoteric set ups, for reasons Grant has already explained. I can't recall the details, but it involved convoluted relaying through some american ISP, tiered fall-backs in case of delivery failure, self-signed TLS certs and a number of local/external email accounts and multiple aliases. Once the pain of understanding its sytanx, setting it up and testing was done with, the system worked *exactly* as I wished, day in day out, without errors and without missing messages. For years. It was so reliable, I had to re- familiarise myself with its syntax whenever I wanted to change something in its behaviour. A nice problem to have, compared with so many poorly written applications today.
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