

Lessons from 30 years of Sendmail - bitsai
http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/425906/0a67de2f6571a73a/

======
com
As a victim/administrator of sendmail-based mail systems from the 1980's to
the late 1990's, this was a pretty interesting interview: anyone know of good
retrospectives from other epochal software, especially open source?

I'd love to see retrospectives and lessons-learned on BIND, awk, perl, ssh,
the Linux kernel, PostgreSQL etc.

One of the noteworthy points is that Eric Allman really does skim over the
unbelievably crappy model for managing security problems in the code and in
configurations (understandable of course, for the time, but a retrospective on
how that can be/is better now would be fascinating), the guru-level fragility
and bizarreness of configuration (the implementor and administrator use-
cases).

And also, more than a line in passing about sendmail.com, one of the first
semi-open source startups.

