Alan McConnell wrote:

> I can understand where he is coming from. I prefer to think
> that both Mr Venema and Mr Hildebrandt had a hard day on
> Thursday, and that today they will revert to what I hope is
> their usual benign and _helpful_ behavior.

Just imagine you have a problem with maildir. You RTFM, you search
the web, you get postfix running, everything works except one small
thingy. If you somehow manage to either
a) forget to create /var/spool/mail/$user
b) destroy /var/spool/mail/$user
c) whatever other problem (such as temporarily moving to another spool)
then you are in big trouble.

Then you RTFM and RTFM again. Nothing about creating directories.
Hmm, strange. Directories in the user's homedir work fine, OK,
permission problem suspected. So now you look into the source because
if anything else fails, including RTFM then read the source.

In the source it says that missing directories are created. You
start to debug the problem and soon find out this has to do with
postfix doing an suid to the user *before* it starts creating dirs.
Also, at the moment it changes uid it already runs as a non privileged
user so it wouldn't be able to create a directory anyways.

At this time you think: I cannot be the only one having this problem.
You start looking on the web, again. You find this same question
many times. The question is sometimes in English, most of the time
it is in broken English. However, if you really want to help, you
will be able to understand the question.

Then look at the answers. Many answers are not to the point. Many
answers by Venema are assuming the original poster is a moron.

Having seen that, I still tried to get a useful answer. I posted
the information I think was useful. I even wrote a short, ugly patch
and because I knew it wasn't postfix material I told so myself. In
stead of replying to the problem, Wietse found it necessary to tell
me the code wasn't secure. Big deal, it was there to prove a point
and not to be included in the program. " if {something} do this else
do that" will also not compile but it is an excellent way of discussing
something, that is: if you *want* to communicate.

I have no idea what Venema and Mr Hildebrandt had to face yesterday.
I do know that being blunt and rude is something Venema suffers from
longer than just today. He may have been helpful to you but that is
not my experience.

Thanks for listening,
Alex
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