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Date:      Mon, 17 Jun 2002 03:59:45 -0700
From:      "Philip J. Koenig" <pjklist@ekahuna.com>
To:        stable@FreeBSD.ORG
Cc:        Gregory Neil Shapiro <gshapiro@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: 4.6 - sendmail: libsm.a and libsmutil.a
Message-ID:  <20020617105946254.AAA631@empty1.ekahuna.com@pc02.ekahuna.com>
In-Reply-To: <15629.30441.322568.979269@horsey.gshapiro.net>
References:  <20020613221245922.AAA606@empty1.ekahuna.com@pc02.ekahuna.com>

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On 16 Jun 2002, at 22:43, Gregory Neil Shapiro boldly uttered: 

> pjklist> Clearly Sendmail has their work cut out for them in regards to 
> pjklist> documentation - it's a mess.
> 
> Volunteers are always welcome.  Keep in mind there are only two developers
> working on sendmail (Claus and I).  We try to do the best we can but we are
> not perfect and we don't have infinite time (though it would be nice --
> anyone have a time machine they can donate to sendmail.org?).


Ah well I was never trying to suggest you guys needed to be 
superhuman or anything, personally I think you both do a great job of 
not only your development work but managing to help out end users as 
well.  Nonetheless, you have to admit the docs are in need of work. 
(I don't suppose anyone's working on a 3rd ed of the O'Reilly book?  
That would be the best thing IMHO.  The 2nd edition they're still 
selling is hopelessly out of date)

Re: volunteering - when I saw what the situation was I started 
thinking "hey, since I spent so much time starting to reformat the 
README file so I could print it out, maybe I'll just do it all the 
way and submit it as a contribution".  Then I realized that the 
chances of Sendmail wanting something formatted on a Windoze box with 
most likely something like Word wouldn't be too good. (I know little 
or nothing about traditional Unix text formatting tools like troff, 
etc.)

Then I thought I'd make it a PDF file, but then it's not easily 
editable and it still says it's generated from Billware.  Then I 
thought maybe I'd do it in HTML, but my HTML skills aren't too great.

Then I found the HTML'ized version of the 8.9.3 README file on 
Sendmail's site, and stopped thinking about it so much.  I can see 
myself doing reformatting but not actually writing much copy 
(although I'm good at that in general), because as I said my 
knowledge of Sendmail right now isn't very good - thus my comment 
about doing more harm than good.


> pjklist> (ie the info above should be in the Sendmail README file, I would
> pjklist> think)
> 
> I disagree.  It was a bug in the older versions of libmilter which was
> fixed in later versions.  The README file shouldn't document what was
> broken in earlier releases.  If a user wants to know what is fixed between
> releases, they should look at the RELEASE_NOTES file (where this change is
> noted).  If they want to know about known issues in the current version,
> they should look at the various README files and the KNOWNBUGS file.


Yep, I suppose I was focusing on that file (the README in the cf 
directory, that is - there's another one in the ..src/contrib/ 
sendmail directory) because that's what I had to read to find out 
about new FEATURES that didn't exist in the more easily perused docs 
from other places which were based on the older versions. 

Once again I do appreciate your work and if you think there's 
something I can help out with I'm all ears.  I'm even local. :-)

Phil



--
Philip J. Koenig                                       pjklist@ekahuna.com
Electric Kahuna Systems -- Computers & Communications for the New Millenium


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