Re: Reliable software OR Is CPAN the sacred cow

[Anonymous Monk]

Bloody DJB fanboys and their useless rants! You guys pop up every now and then on any programming-related mailing list or forum, spew forth about how nobody understands "secure" programming except for you and the celestial DJB and then vanish again because it takes you six months to code a secure way of opening a file.

Answer me this, oh powerful one, if your esteemed deity's way of programming is so ultimately superior why does noone (not even the vocal members of the qmail and djbns mailing lists) use the code as he wrote it? They all use extensions and enhancements someone else added (which by the somewhat insane license DJB uses would be illegal if anyone cared) or rewrite the whole shebang themselves because otherwise these apps might have been useful last decade but certainly are not now.

So yeah, go ahead, program your own POWER::SUPER::IAMGOD:: namespace as long as you like and revel in your superiority. The rest of us will happily go on using modules that actually do the work. Feel free to climb down from your tower whenever you want to contribute to the real world.

[powerman]

why does noone (not even the vocal members of the qmail and djbns mailing lists) use the code as he wrote it?

You wrong about "noone", but this isn't a point, so... Because people need "features". Most of such features can't be coded in reliable&secure way because of their nature. DJB prefer to not use such features, at least until somebody invent secure&reliable way to develop them. Anyway I suppose while DJB's software with few patches is less secure&reliable than without these patches, it's still much more secure&reliable than most of other software. AND - you've choice: use more reliable less features version or less reliable more features version. I think this is goodness.

BTW, I'm partially agree with you - developing really reliable&secure software sometimes require too much time. And this is one of reasons why I writing here - I wish to calibrate my feeling about this, to avoid developing reliable&secure email parser in next 2 years.