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"The OpenBSD project produces a FREE, multi-platform 4.4BSD-based UNIX-like operating system." You can't really divorce UNIX from C. The only other language o

by stsp 11y ago

"The OpenBSD project produces a FREE, multi-platform 4.4BSD-based UNIX-like operating system." You can't really divorce UNIX from C. The only other language option for an smtpd server in OpenBSD base would have been Perl, and I bet people would complain about that just the same. And perhaps we wouldn't be able to review it properly if it was written in Perl. Perhaps Marc Espie could. But OpenBSD has plenty of people on the team who are well trained at auditing C. I'll be doing my part and read some smtpd code during an 8h train ride tomorrow. I already read one file and found one bug in it and told gilles about it. That's how this works. Changing the language won't magically fix anything.

zx2c4 11y ago
> I'll be doing my part and read some smtpd code during an 8h train ride tomorrow. I already read one file and found one bug in it and told gilles about it. Wonderful! This is exactly what I (and many others) were hoping for. Thanks so much for your willingness to jump in like that.
- stsp 11y ago
  Did you try to tell gilles, eric, and some other committers about your concerns in private, before posting on a public mailing list and then submitting your own post to HN?
  - zx2c4 11y ago
    It's a conversation that's been going on for a long time now over various channels but has/had mostly stagnated into a disappointing lull of complacency. The Quayls results were a big wake up to that, and my own finding yesterday was the final straw: fresh ideas and voices on how to carry the project toward maturation are quite necessary, as well as smart folks like yourself becoming interested in reviewing the source code.
  - poolpOrg 11y ago
    No, he didn't. As much as he'd like to make it like we don't fix bugs, our public bug tracker is one click away and shows that out of the 25 open issues and the 493 closed issues, none mentions even remotely a pending crash that he is experiencing. He does have some feature requests and bugs though, with many handled already, so it seems that he does knows where to find it when he needs to. As for his concerns, yes he did tell me, he sent me 16 mails yesterday, including the one with the trace. Unfortunately, he sent it past midnight, at about the same time he made it public because he just couldn't wait until morning to disclose.

by stsp 11y ago

zx2c4 11y ago

> I'll be doing my part and read some smtpd code during an 8h train ride tomorrow. I already read one file and found one bug in it and told gilles about it. Wonderful! This is exactly what I (and many others) were hoping for. Thanks so much for your willingness to jump in like that.

stsp 11y ago
Did you try to tell gilles, eric, and some other committers about your concerns in private, before posting on a public mailing list and then submitting your own post to HN?
- zx2c4 11y ago
  It's a conversation that's been going on for a long time now over various channels but has/had mostly stagnated into a disappointing lull of complacency. The Quayls results were a big wake up to that, and my own finding yesterday was the final straw: fresh ideas and voices on how to carry the project toward maturation are quite necessary, as well as smart folks like yourself becoming interested in reviewing the source code.
- poolpOrg 11y ago
  No, he didn't. As much as he'd like to make it like we don't fix bugs, our public bug tracker is one click away and shows that out of the 25 open issues and the 493 closed issues, none mentions even remotely a pending crash that he is experiencing. He does have some feature requests and bugs though, with many handled already, so it seems that he does knows where to find it when he needs to. As for his concerns, yes he did tell me, he sent me 16 mails yesterday, including the one with the trace. Unfortunately, he sent it past midnight, at about the same time he made it public because he just couldn't wait until morning to disclose.