Re: Insert signature patch

[Brian Stafford <brian stafford uklinux net>]

On Wed, 16 May 10:24 Carlos Morgado wrote:
| 
| On 2001.05.16 09:20:04 +0100 Brian Stafford wrote:
| 
| 
| > Another thought I had was to allow pine's trick of specifying
| > a list of fallback servers,
| > e.g. "host1.example.org, host2.example.org ..."
| > 
| shouldn't this be done with dns ?

Absolutely.  From 0.7.1 libESMTP will try *all* the addresses returned
from gethostbyname[_r]() to find a server instead of just the first
one so failover will work correctly.  Implementing Pine's backoff
strategy over this would be a pain so I'm not inclined much to do
it unless I get a *lot* of requests for it.

| > Finally, there is another way to start a service ... the way inetd
| > does using fork/exec and running the protocol across a pipe or
| > AF_LOCAL socket. Sendmail operates this way with the -bs option
| > running an SMTP session on its standard input.  This type of
| operation
| > might have its place in libESMTP (if I do this I might add support
| > for te LMTP protocol too).  A syntax to allow this might look like
| > "|/usr/sbin/sendmail -bs".
| > 
| that would be great and allow balsa to do away with the --with-esmtp 
| sillyness (which i added). actually, when i was doing it i was
| thinking
| the correct aproach would to write a small lib using the libESMTP API
| to do local MTA and shipping that with balsa. if you're already
| planning
| on having it on main libESMTP i'm Happy :)

The main reasons I haven't done this yet are 1) I want to get the
current codebase stable and 2) I can't decide if its the correct
approach or not.  After all inetd can be configured to run
"sendmail -bs" on some port and libESMTP can be pointed at that
port on the local host.  Same end result(?) and no coding on my part :)

Unless I've missed anything obviously useful, I'd like to make the
0.7.1 feature set the libESMTP 1.0 feature set.

If the general feeling is that this is a Good Thing to have, I'll
put it on my TODO list.

Regards
Brian