Bear Giles <bear@coyotesong.com> writes:
> > Caution: I wasted some time running "benchmarks" that proved only
> > to be exercising how fast the client could fail. qmail-getpw's
> > approach to error handling seems to be (a) don't bother testing for
> > very many error conditions (eg, it coredumps on an empty sqlserver
> > control file), and (b) if it does detect a failure, exiting with a
> > nonzero error code is a sufficient way of reporting it. Error messages
> > are for wimps, apparently.
>
> (b) is part of the qmail strategy - qmail is implemented as a set
> of independent processes with different owners and rights and they
> communicate problems through standard exit codes.
>
> We can agree that it should be more forthcoming with meaningful
> help for people setting up the system, but it can't just write an
> message to STDOUT because its caller has probably already set up
> a pipe to another process - any error message would normally find
> itself inserted into the mail queue!
Gaah. Has djb ever heard of syslog(3)? Or is that too insecure for
him?
-Doug
--
Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees. --T. J. Jackson, 1863
