First off, I'd like to say that I'm in complete agreement with
Philip's arguments. But I would like to inject one extremely
minor technical correction nit.
Technically, the line terminator used by Exim is not LF (Line Feed),
it is NL (New Line). Same binary value, different semantics. Here
are the relevant descriptions from ANSi X3.4-1977 (American National
Standard Code for Information Interchange)
5. Definitions
...
5.2 Control Characters
...
0/10 LF (Line Feed) A format effector that advances
the ative position to the same character position on
the next line. Where appropriate, this character may
have the meaning "New Line" (NL), a format effector
that advances the active position to the first character
position on the next line. Use of the NL convention
requires agreement between sender and recipient of
data.
...
0/13 CR (Carriage Return (Return)). A format effector
that moves the active position to the first character
position on the same line.
So the network transmission standard of CR LF and the Exim/Unix
usage of NL are both well within the standard. (But MicroSoft's
use of CR is not. Big surprise.)
Perhaps those who believe Exim should use CR LF internally would
be more comfortable thinking of the octet it does use as NL
instead of LF...
-Pat
