On 21-Mar-01 at 14:26:29 Philip Hazel wrote:
> I have found it extremely hard to write this book.
>
Very much appreciated though :-)
> I think the main difficulty (apart from the fact that I'm too close to
> Exim) is that too many concepts intermix with each other. For example,
> if you want to give examples of routers (or other drivers) other than
> the most trivial cases, you need string expansions and lookups, but you
> can't cover them first, because in order to give meaningful examples of
> string expansions and lookups, you need the drivers. In the reference
> manual, I describe the lookups, expansions, and lists first, with very
> few examples, but this approach is wrong for a book that is supposed to
> be instructional. What I've ended up doing is introducing expansions and
> lookups bit by bit, as needed for routers, etc., and then having an "in
> depth" chapter later. Of necessity, this leads to some repetition.
>
A sort of 'catch-22' situation :-) When I very first read the manual I had
to lightly read through it once to get the idea of what Exim could/could not
do, and then read through it again to put together the bits we could use,
possible directors, routers etc. From that I could start to create a
plausible configure file. Note - 'reading' a manual is not exactly easy (!)
but there seemed to be no other way to learn anything about Exim. Hopefully,
the book will now fulfil this purpose.
Repetition is not a bad thing - it reinforces the ideas necessary to build
up directors, routers, transports and the like without having to jump around
the book.
John.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
John Horne, University of Plymouth, UK Tel: +44 (0)1752 233914
E-mail: jhorne@???
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