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From: solomon@wisc-crys.arpa (Marvin Solomon)
Newsgroups: net.mail.headers
Subject: Re: "blaming Unix SendMail"
Message-ID: <8404201631.AA06136@wisc-crys.arpa>
Date: Fri, 20-Apr-84 11:31:40 EST
Article-I.D.: hou3c.489
Posted: Fri Apr 20 11:31:40 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 21-Apr-84 01:55:42 EST
Sender: ka@hou3c.UUCP (Kenneth Almquist)
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To: VAF@CMU-CS-C.ARPA
Cc: Header-People@MIT-MC.ARPA

The change you suggested is already in sendmail (the version distributed
with 4.2 UNIX).  I believe I was the one who suggested the particular
"trick" now used.  I thought of it years ago while trying to make Adventure
start up more quickly.  Take ANY program that has a complicated and
time-consuming startup and add two options:  When the program is called
with the first option, it goes through the initialization, then dumps
everything willy-nilly into a file.  (In C, that can usually be done
by simply dumping bss: everything from _edata to _end; in FORTRAN it
can be done by dumping COMMON).  When called with the second option, the
program skips the initialization and simply loads the file.

Now the bad news:  The syntax for sendmail configuration files was designed
before the "freeze-file" idea was incorporated, but even though the
justification is now gone, nobody is very anxious to change it.
I think the best course is simply to improve the instructions for creating
configuration files, but that's much more boring that creating more software
:-)

Sendmail was designed and implemented by Eric Allman.  If you disagree
with some aspect of its design, argue with him.  I believe he's already
stated publicly that he's sorry he made the configuration file so cryptic,
and if he had it to do over, he'd do it differently.  

Comments like "I'm just tired of seeing so much braindamage like this in
Unix" are really off the mark.  I'm tired of seeing so much sectarian strife.