Re: [exim-dev] patch for named acl variables

Quoting Philip Hazel:

>> Oh, are you sure about that? I think many people (including me) rely on
>> variables being empty by default. It's surely no big deal to set to the
>> empty string them at the beginning of the connect and mail acl.
> It is if you don't know what their names are. :-)

I meant in the config file. Whoever edits it should know which variables
he uses.

> But I don't really mind on this one. Whatever people want...

I'd prefer to make that configurable, if you don't mind another config
option.


But now there's a different problem: I rewrote the code to use the btree
functions. Easy to handle while they are in memory, but what to do when
they go to disk? Dumping is easy, but when reading in, tree_insertnode
has to be called for every variable, which is expensive with all its
rebalancing etc. As far as I can see, there are three possible solutions:

1. Ignore it, it's a non-problem. The 1000-variables-person will have
already have this problem already when setting the variables, so he
should have a proper machine, anyway.

2. Write information about the tree into the spool file (like the
existing tree_write does). This an incompatible change, once again, but
it's easy to write a small script to rewrite the spool files into the
old format, should somebody have a need for that.

3. Use a hash function for lookups instead of the btree. There won't be
millions of records, so we can take something light-weight.


Being lazy, I'd prefer the first solution (works this way right now). :)
Comments, anyone?