On Thu, 21 Feb 2002, Richard Torrens wrote:
> > Which RISCOS? Acorn's or the other one? (I'm familiar with the former,
> > not the latter. I used to to testing for Acorn. In fact, I'm at home,
> > posting this from a RISC PC running RISC OS as it happens.)
>
> There is only one... Acorn's workstation operation was sold to Pace.
No, there is another one. It was (is?) some kind of operating system for
a MIPS risc processor. I know no more about it, but I have had
misunderstandings in the past. That was why I was checking.
> > Have you read my Exim book, published by O'Reilly? That is supposed to
> > contain this kind of general, introductory, overview information.
>
> No. I was wondering if the general style of that was different to your
> html instructions - it is very difficult for any product designer to write
> at an introductory level!
I know. For this reason, I had hoped that somebody would write the Exim
book. There was one attempt, but it foundered, and in the end I had to
do it myself. The general style of the book is indeed supposed to be
different to the reference manual, but I am not the right person to tell
you how well I succeeded. Maybe somebody else on the list who has read
it can comment.
> I find that many computer books that take a tutorial approach are
> unreadable. I find an introductory part followed by a full reference
> section to be the easiest. Once you know the programmer's thinking and the
> program's rationale, the reference section becomes meaningful!
I entirely agree. However, the book does not contain a full reference
manual because it would be too long. It omits some of the very esoteric
features, but does contain almost all of the "common" things.
> That's one thing that I find less than clear-cut in the documentation. The
> demarcation between user level and administrator level.
The only "user level" stuff in Exim is filtering, and for that I wrote
the document "Exim's interface to mail filtering" with end users in
mind. Everything else is for the Exim admin.
> In some ways it seems to be like Apache itself: there are Admin commands -
> and there are user level commands (which can be used in .htaccess files) -
> but as the grey area between is configurable....
Sorry, you lost me. I have no idea what a .htaccess file is. It is not
an Exim thing.
> Since Exim can be run under RiscOS -
No it can't! Exim is a Unix program. There's no way it could be made to
run under RiscOS. There's some big misunderstanding going on here. My
guess is that you are in some specific environment provided by an ISP
that happens to use Exim, but there's other stuff involved as well about
which I know nothing, but which you assume is standard with Exim. That's
just a guess, of course, but I'm convinced we are at cross-purposes at
the moment.
Philip
--
Philip Hazel University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10@??? Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.
