[Pkg-exim4-users] Questions about configuring

[Ross Boylan]

On Sat, Jun 04, 2005 at 09:56:40PM +0200, Marc Haber wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 01, 2005 at 01:28:34PM -0700, Ross Boylan wrote:
> > On Sun, 2005-05-29 at 08:10 +0200, Andreas Metzler wrote: 
...
> > The new README seems to
> > indicate everything can go under main, and the update-exim4.conf manpage
> > indicates main is read first.  Since the general logic is by
> > alphabetical order, and acl precedes main, I'm a little concerned
> > changes to acl need to go in acl/00_local.
> 
> Well, we assume that people intending to mess with exim's
> configuration beyond the pre-fabricated stuff that we offer have
> acquired some basic familiarity with exim configuration beforehand. I
> don't think that this should be a misassumption.

The issue for me was understanding the behavior of update-exim4.conf,
not exim's configuration syntax.  Also, I was imagining a scenario in
which the administrator just wants to tweak the variable definitions,
and might not be much of an exim expert.

....
> 
> If we go to documentation _that_ detailed (this text is almost more
> exact than the actual code), we also need to say something about
> foo.rul taking precendence over foo. Andreas, since you made that
> change, can you please...

Hmm, you mean the contents of a file named foo.rul will appear before
the contents of file foo?  That is surprising.

> 
> > Although I know it would require more work, you might consider
> > discussing the split and unsplit configurations separately in
> > README.Debian (and perhaps some of the man pages).  I think that
> > would make it easier to follow.
> 
> It would, however, duplicate a lot of the explanations, making it
> harder to keep them in sync.

Are you talking about duplication across files or within a single
file?  Assuming it's the latter, an intermediate solution might be to
use formatting and labelling to distinguish the two cases a  bit more
clearly than the docs do now.

> 
> > Finally, the comment in exim4.conf.template could be clearer.  It now reads
> > ######################################################################
> > # Depending on where you find this file, this might be a template or
> > # an actual configuration file. Documentation about the Debian exim4
> > # configuration scheme can be found in
> > # /usr/share/doc/exim4-base/README.Debian.gz.
> > #
> > # Strings like DEBCONFsomethingDEBCONF are replaced by installation
> > # dependent values by update-exim4.conf, the script which builds the
> > # actual configuration from the templates.
> > 
> > I'm still not sure what the template/actual configuration file distinction means.
> 
> It means that people kept copying /etc/exim4.conf.template to
> /etc/exim.conf without reading and/or thinking and swiftly proceeded
> to yell at us for shipping a syntactically invalid configuration template.

Oh.  That's not an easy thing to make clear.  How about

Warning: the comments in this file assume it is being used as a
template by update-exim4.conf, but some administrators may copy it
manually into /etc/exim.conf [do you mean /etc/exim4/exim.conf?].
Some of the comments do not apply in that case.
?

Unfortunately, that's much longer.

> 
> > It would be simpler to say
> > ######################################################################
> > # This file is only used in the non-split configuration case.
> > # Documentation about the Debian exim4
> > # configuration scheme can be found in
> > # /usr/share/doc/exim4-base/README.Debian.gz.
> 
> This is how it was originally. People were too stupid for that.
I guess that makes me too stupid to be stupid, which might be a good
thing :)

....

Ross