Re: [Exim] Planning for Exim 4

On Thu, Jan 04, 2001 at 10:48:47AM +0000, Philip Hazel wrote:
> I have been giving some thought to the choice between the "ACL" and
> "AND/OR" syntax for checking incoming recipients. The following seem to
> me to be relevant to the choice:
>
> 1. Which will be easier for the beginner? (Experienced people will cope
> either way.)
Well, I'm qualified for answering as a beginner. ;-)
Personally I beliefe that it would be easier to use ACL. Readability (and
writability) are much better than using the boole-Syntax and other Systems
are using the same syntax, so it would be able to apply apache-knowledge to
exim (and vice versa).
If there are no problems implementing ACL-parsing (hint: what about using
the apache-ACL-Parsing code and writing an ACL-parsing lib? libacl or
something... just a thought, I'm no programmer so I don't know if it might
be practical... but since some programs already use ACL using a common
library would help for making sure, that ACL-syntax really is the same for
every programm, without subtle differences...)

Second point, since there have been voices to keep the distinction
router/director: personally, I as a new exim-user have differences with this
distinction. It is no problem as SUCH, you can say "directors should do
this, routers should do that", but in my situation this distinction just
doesn't work (perhaps some remember, I told it before):

Central MX for my.domain, distributing (table-lookup) to mail1.my.domain ...
mail10.my.domain, some messages are kept local. So since 95% of all mails
are not for mx.my.domain, I could say "assume that mail is not local, use
a router, do a lookup and if you find out that the mail IS local then switch
to a director and deliver locally".
But using a director, assuming mail to be local, perhaps failing
local-lookup and then handing it to a director to do a second lookup and
delivering it to an other system would accomplish the same.
So what should I choose? And how would I tell a router "upps, it's local
after all, user director X" or a director "band, not local, use router Y"?
And since I want to have a clear design, I could not decide which attempt to
use (if both were possible, I am not sure). However, since my project has
been delayed at least 3 month, I haven't been trying hard to find a solution
in the last weeks.

Desing would be MUCH better without the distincion between router and
director. I would love to wait for exim4, before migrating to exim, but I am
afraid I can't wait that long. What a pity.

--
CU,
Patrick.
"Never run on auto-pilot" - The Pragmatic Programmer