Karsten Bräckelmann <guenther <at> rudersport.de> writes:
> On Thu, 2009-02-26 at 16:12 +0000, Ray wrote:
> > Is there a feature like PostFix's `postconf` to display the currently
> > parsed
> > and calculated config?
>
> That pretty much equals your local.cf, no?
No, the currently effective config is not equal to my local.cf (even for
postconf -n equivalency) because, as you say, users can change their user_prefs.
So we're lead to "Isn't that your local.cf plus your user_prefs?" Well, not
just local.cf, IIUC, but potentially any of the 47 files in my hosting
provider's /usr/share/spamassassin and /etc/mail/spamassassin dirs (or any
others if they happen to have configured such), plus my user_prefs file
(_except_ any items which are prohibited from being overridden (except the
privileged settings which are actually allowed by allow_user_rules (except those
privileged settings which are actually "administrator" privileged settings which
cannot be allowed via allow_user_rules))), but minus misspellings and possibly
minus rules following misspellings in any of the config files.
Have I missed anything? _I don't know._
If manual parsing is really the way to know for sure what my effective SA config
is, is this the procedure I need?
* determine all site-wide SA config dirs
* locate hosting provider's config dirs, manually parse four dozen files
- perhaps know any config item interdependencies
- understand the impact of config aberrations like misspellings
* modulo this result with my user_prefs file
- know which config items cannot be overriden
That looks pretty ugly, but theoretically it's not so bad. Except the
open-ended search to learn the distinct parts when coming new to SA. There's
lots of very good documentation, but it's fragmented. Meaning, if I want to
know for sure exactly what results in the effective config, do I consult the
POD? Or maybe the POD and the man pages, and perhaps a particular wiki article
and that's it, period.
You come upon another party's camp in the icy wastes and chase off the raiders.
With moderate effort you find two people strewn among the wreckage, and with a
little more you find a third, and you bring them all back to your base camp.
But if you'd looked a little harder you would have found another.
I imagine just about every SA admin here has played out the scenario repeatedly
and knows the locations of the bodies. "Come on, there are only four." Heck,
even though I didn't install the SA here and I'm coming at this as a total noob
I may already have all the critical details I need. But how am I to know that?
This is what I mean by open-ended.
Maybe there are no noob SA admins, so maybe the postconf-reveals-all-the-bodies
desire I have is weird and just a byproduct my unusually ignorant perspective?
That feels very unlikely, but I'm keeping an open mind about it.
Maybe my being a "user" versus a site-wide administrator is the atypical thing
here?
RSK
