[H-GEN] CRM114

[Jason Parker-Burlingham]

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Greg Black <gjb at gbch.net> writes:

> Jason Parker-Burlingham wrote:
> | If it's what I think it is---and a Google search confirms it is---the
> | syntax for the control language, and the source code for the
> | interpreter don't inspire confidence, no matter how good the results.
> I would be interested to hear what specific factors are the
> source of your concern.

I gave it a ten-minute once-over on the day I started using
spamassassin.  I downloaded and unpacked it and discovered that what's
*really* going on is that the author has written software to allow for
regular expressions to be modified to better match patterns.  At this
point my "overkill" alarm started to go off.

Looking back, I can see the default tarball ships binaries along with
the source (ick), the software is classified as "prealpha" and "poorly
tested", and so on.

Oh!  _That's_ what gave me the heebie-jeebies while reading
quickref.txt:

syscall <flags> (:in:) (:out:) (:keep:) /command/ - execute a shell command

I don't think I like that idea very much at all.

Nor was I impressed with the proposed control mechanism, which was
sending email to the program.

Particular to the source code, it's not warning clean (although it
would probably be easy to fix), uses C++-style comments, and isn't
terribly idiomatic (although it's nice to see the author checking the
return value of his calls).

All in all I think the syscall keyword and the control mechanism
disturb me the most.
-- 
||----|---|------------|--|-------|------|-----------|-#---|-|--|------||
| ``I think I'm going to throw up.''                                    |
|                                             -- Kermit the Frog, Yambo |
||--|--------|--------------|----|-------------|------|---------|-----|-|

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