OT?: Emailing from within filepro

[Fairlight]

The honourable and venerable Tom Aldridge spoke thus:
> 
> However, not to look a gift horse in the mouth in that Mark certainly is an
> extremely knowledgeable person, I'll bet that most everyone who is sending
> mail from within a filePro processing table invokes it simply with 'mail'
> and not the complete path. Now here comes the conroversial flame invoking
> comment: Had you, Mark, just given some direction about the specific problem
> I was having instead going into your "Charles Emerson Winchester III" mode
> ("us more highly evolved would never have invoked mail without the 'full
> path'"), I wouldn't have been side tracked.

Why do you assume I'm going to flame?  I'm happy to keep disappointing you.

I gave the extra hint that I did to minimise problems that may occur, and
in the same breath cited why they may occur.  Yes, most people seem to
simply call "mail" without qualification.  All those people are subject
to $PATH order of precedence fouling their work if they can't control (or
aren't aware of, or don't set) the environment.  A prime candidate and
example of this, as I said, is setting up a cron job and assuming it will
work as it would from the shell.  That is not necessarily true.

And if you can't respect that assessment from me, you'll remember Joe
Greco, whom you did respect, and who (despite our falling out since
then over several serious personal issues) is far more brilliant and
knowledgeable than I am.  Well he's the one that drilled that concept into
my head in my earliest days of *nix use, before I was even an admin, back
when I was a plain old user.  And it's a concept that stays with me to this
day.  It's also quite solid advice or I wouldn't pass it on.

Key point being that you -never- assume anything about your environment.
That everyone seems to is no excuse for doing so.  Many chmod 0777
everything they can get their hands on, run all users UID 0, etc.  That's
doesn't make it right, and it doesn't make it safe.  There's no safety in
numbers in this field.  If there were, M$ systems would be impervious to
attack.  If you check the security bulletins, you'll see that's the
farthest thing from the truth.

That you fouled the steps towards cleaning up your code to the standards I
was taught to hold code to and have thus passed unto others is, as you say,
your mistake.

In all fairness, I -did- provide an -exact- link to the problem which you
were encountering issues with, regarding the SGID issue.  That you tackled
two issues at the same time didn't help you.  Indeed, I said that the
pathing issue was -not- your problem.  I quote myself:

"...fashion.  Depending on path precedence is not a good idea on this one.
I'd specify the full path.  But that's not the problem.  It's bad form,
to assume an environment however.  You could get very odd results if you
switched this to a cron job, for instance."

Note the words, "But that's not the problem."  I flat-out said,
unambiguously, that this was not the issue, it was simply bad form that
could bite you at some point.  Yes, it should be changed.  That didn't mean
in the same fell swoop.  One of the tenets of debugging is to change the
least amount of variables at one time, minimising risk of confusion and
further obfuscation of the issue.  Generally this means a single one step
at a time, but there are instances in which you have no choice but to make
several choices at once.  You had a choice here, given that I said this was
not your issue.  <Knight_Templar> You chose poorly. </Knight_Templar>

I then went on to give the link to the details regarding your -actual-
problem.

Overall, I think I was perfectly clear.

If you want to see -real- CEW III type behaviour, pay a visit to
comp.lang.perl.misc someday and post code with -formatting- that they
don't approve of, where there is absolutely -no- possibility of syntactic
destructiveness.  You have -no- idea until you've had that particular
dubious pleasure.  They'll entirely ignore the actual technical issue until
you clean up your formatting, period.  I kid you not.  They'll refuse to
read it and simply say the formatting gives them too much of a headache to
read, even though it's syntactically correct (and actually more explicit
than looser code).  I'm nowhere close to that level of behaviour, but I
invite you to experience it firsthand someday if you want free
"entertainment".  Truer purists I have not seen the likes of.

> Thanks though, I know you did offer suggestions in an effort to help.

May God save my soul, yes I did.  And you're welcome.

mark->
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