In the context of SPF and its need for SRS instead of simplemail forwarding, a local sysadmin recently asked on our sysadmin mailinglist:

What is bad about remailing?

Fundamentally we're being asked to do extra work that benefits otherpeople, people who've chosen to break their own mailers for no actualbenefit. This is backwards, and in my opinion accommodating such peopleonly encourages the next lot to demand that everyone else clean up theirmesses.

Apart from that:

• remailing requires additional software and configuration,

; cat Makefilefoo : /tmp/bar	touch foo; mkdir /tmp/bar; maketouch foo; make`foo' is up to date.; touch /tmp/bar/t; make`foo' is up to date.; gmaketouch foo

As ' make -ndd ' shows, for some reason Solaris 8's version of makedecides that directories always have a timestamp of 0. It knows thatthey exist, because if you remove /tmp/bar it complains aboutit.

Any Internet protocol change that requires everyone's participation isdead on arrival.

This often applies to would-be antispam efforts such as SPF .

(Superficially, SPF looks like it is an isolated thing that onlyinvolves the sender having SPF records and the receiver checkingthem. It's not, and the way it requires everyone's participationis illustrated by the need for the Sender Rewriting Scheme .)

In the tradition of previous entries , some firstirritations with Fedora Core 6. All of this is on an x86_64 upgradefrom Fedora Core 5 on a machine with a stock configuration and stockGUI, and is mostly about the upgrade process.

• I had to manually specify noapic on my hardware. This is not toosurprising, since the regular FC5 kernels now need it, but the FC5install kernel was fine without it.
• at least if you have a non-RAID root device but

Life probably would be easier if the people behind Exim's string expansions hadjust been able to write a Lisp. Unfortunately that might have createdsome irrational prejudice against Exim, so I can see why they needed todisguise what they were doing.

(It would have been a pretty mutant Lisp. But mutating your Lisp isalmost de rigueur.)

Of course, I must include a pointer to Greenspun's Tenth Rule ofProgramming .