Its possible to make a very good case for replacing exim's string
expansion syntax with a full scripting language, however that will be a
really major break - I think it will also necessitate re-architecting
exim at the same time. So we're looking at exim 5 (or 6) level releases
for doing this. Even though it is an ideal time to release exim 5
(Debian did ship exim 4 in stable a few months back... :-) ), thats
going to take some considerable time.
If we do go along this path my feeling is that the configuration stuff
is likely to break backwards compatibility in a big way.
Can I suggest this discussion move to exim-dev, maybe sketching out
proposed solutions in wiki pages, and see where we get to.
I would certainly be interested in the idea of using lua (as an example)
as an embedded configuration/scripting language. I'm not sure at
present how you would handle the deferred evaluation stuff other than
making everything a function (ie how do you set the received header
string in a lua like configuration so it expands appropriately at the
time of use). The use of something like this might also mean that acls
become function calls etc. Not sure how to model routers etc.
Lua can be found at
http://www.lua.org/
http://lua-users.org/
Nigel.
--
[ Nigel Metheringham Nigel.Metheringham@??? ]
[ - Comments in this message are my own and not ITO opinion/policy - ]