On Wed, Jun 05, 2002 at 04:25:53PM -0400, Bryan Hoover wrote: | Craig R Hughes wrote: | | > Spamd is not a client of SA, it's a client of spamd, through the | > well-define | > SPAMD/SPAMC protocol. | | I'm using the term client in the same sense that any procedure, or | program that calls another procedure or program, is a client of the | procedure or program it calls (from your response, I'm not clear that | you understood this). In this sense, as far as whichever of the two - | spamc or spamd - calls SA, they are SA clients.
Neither "calls" "SA". SA is a library. There are 2 main front-ends
providing user access to this library : "/usr/bin/spamassassin" and
the "spamc/spamd" pair. spamd is just SA in daemonized form. It
doesn't call anything outside of itself. spamc exists merely as a
lightweight process that can be exec()ed for a pipe. It uses a socket
to pass a message to spamd for processing (the same way you can use
stdin to pass a message to the /usr/bin/spamassassin script if you use
that) and receives the tagged result back (just like stdout in the
/usr/bin/spamassassin script). Since spamd is a daemon, it doesn't
have stdin/stdout/stderr (it closes them before forking) and thus must
log through syslog or by writing to a file. spamc doesn't log because
it doesn't do anything worthy of note (you wouldn't want every program
to log stuff like "I started now." "I called a function." "I'm
logging because I'm an annoying idiot :-).").
| > Your web browser doesn't report the log messages of every
| > web server you visit, does it?
|
| I don't know, but as a client, it should be able to get it's log
| messages, and output them if it wants, or provide for you to tell it to.
No, you can get error messages from a web server, but not the logs.
You get stuff defined by the HTTP protocol, not
/var/log/apache/error.log (if the server uses apache, and is debian,
else the log may be located elsewhere).
I hope this helps clear up your understanding of how spam assassin
works.
-D
--
Thy Word is a lamp unto my feet
and a light unto my path.
Psalms 119:105
GnuPG key : http://dman.ddts.net/~dman/public_key.gpg
msg05957/pgp00000.pgp
Description: PGP signature
