For many people my software is something that you install and forget. I like to keep it that way.
From Wietse Venema
Writing software that's safe even in the presence of bugs makes the challenge even more interesting.
I was going to visit IBM for six months as a visiting scientist. Now, six months is a lot of time, so I came with a whole list of projects that I might want to work on.
One bug in an SMTP server can open up the whole machine for intrusion.
I want to avoid locking people into solutions that work only with Postfix. People should have a choice in what software they want to use with Postfix, be it anti-virus or otherwise.
My reply is: the software has no known bugs, therefore it has not been updated.
Postfix keeps running even if one Postfix process dies; Windows requires that someone restarts the service.
However, writing software without defects is not sufficient. In my experience, it is at least as difficult to write software that is safe - that is, software that behaves reasonably under adverse conditions.
As of today, the Postfix mail transport agent has almost 50,000 lines of code, comments not included.
In a previous life I wrote the software that controlled my physics experiments. That software had to deal with all kinds of possible failures in equipment. That is probably where I learned to rely on multiple safety nets inside and around my systems.
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