On Thu, Feb 01, 2007 at 04:29:09PM +0000, Graeme Fowler wrote:
> OK, gloves off.
>
> On 01/02/2007 16:06, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
> >i will endeavour to track down the scope of this problem a bit
> >further, because i have just tried this:
> >
> >HELO localhost
> >MAIL FROM:<>
> >RCPT TO:llllllllllllltotallyfakeaddress@localhost
> >
> >and _that_ was accepted (!)
>
> In that case, YOUR copy of Exim is not checking against YOUR copy of
> Cyrus - or anyhting else, in fact - to see if the local_part is valid.
....
heya folks,
i've been thinking carefully about how to reply to this message,
composing a reply over several days.
here's how i expected this conversation, over several emails and days,
to go:
me:
"hello, i'm an experienced free software developer and i consider
myself to be a reasonably experienced linux admin and i've found
a problem that is beyond my level of experience and it might be
a bug and i need help in working it out"
you (exim developers):
"greetings, and thank you for contacting us: we're a bit busy but
we'll try to get to the bottom of this as well you're probably not
correct but we could also be wrong, so we'll see. firstly, just
to check: have you tried [description cut] and could you also
send your configuration or put it online somewhere. btw, with
the greatest of respect: as an experienced free software developer
you should know already to do these things to save us time, slapped
wrist to you. in the mean-time, your issue smells like this one
which we already discussed to death [timescales cut] and here are
some references [urls to archives or even better to wiki pages
supplied] and it would help enormously if you could read and review
those as it will save us a hell of a lot of time which we don't
have a lot of".
me:
"oops, sorry, yes i really should know by now: i'll try to make
life easier for you and save time. here's the config [url cut].
yes i tried X / no i didn't try Y [delete as appropriate]. thank you
for the references, i read them and yes it's the same issue / no
i don't believe it is the same, and this and this and this is why
[delete as appropriate]".
we go round this loop a few times, resolving what the issue is, or at
least trying to resolve it, and each of us gets to learn something,
and, ultimately, hopefully, the quality of the code and/or documentation
that comes out of it gets improved, and everyone is happy that they learned
something.
AT NO FUCKING TIME are the words "ok, gloves off" anticipated to be
heard in those discussions, the ones in my head.
graeme - as an experienced developer, you should know better.
if someone describes to you something that quite obviously demonstrates
that they haven't got a clue [like i did when i didn't know what <>
was], but they appear to be quite articulate and also quite intelligent,
then next time why don't you consider telling them "look, dude, you're
completely in the wrong ball-park, and you're likely to take up quite
a lot of our time if we explain it to you in detail. please trust me
when i say that your issue is probably this this or this, and please
investigate it by trying that, that or that, and come back to us and
let us know".
telling me that my issue is a problem with someone else's default
configuration is FUCK ALL use to man nor beast.
now.
i did some code-walking in exim 4.64 and to me it would appear that
there is a problem with 550 codes being ignored by the code that uses
src/transport/lmtp.c - but (and i know why and i agree with the design)
i haven't yet found the point where the exec()s call out from, as it's
a bit complicated to follow (and the code comments are extremely useful
and well-written but it's _still_ a bit hard to follow as it's
unfamiliar code to me).
here's the thing: i've already made my decision not to pursue this.
instead, i'm just going to put in a little bit of exim config and leave
it at that. if that exim config makes messages from <> bounce with a
reject message saying 'sorry, <> messages not accepted, please send
manually to postmaster@???' then so be it. it solves my immediate
problem.
so, your 'ok gloves off' stupid outburst has _lost_ you someone who
could have helped you solve a problem. helped you to help others. which
is the whole point of writing free software.
_don't_ do that again. not to anybody. no matter _what_ you may have
heard about them.
