Goodness, you're determined to find fault, aren't you? (For the record in re your comment later about my "basis to call [myself] a good system admin", those claims were a) jokey, and b) fairly well-substantiated by my reputation by that time, I should think. I was published by that point and had been on several conference committees along with many who'd be reading that mailing list; I hardly needed to peacock like you seem to think I was doing.)

But I think your criticisms seem a little uninformed (or possibly over-informed by later practice to the point where you aren't considering this in the context of mid-1990's practice). Let's see...

> > And also being a good system administrator, I had written a sendmail.cf [...]

> Say what? Nobody writes a sendmail.cf from scratch, unless they are crazy.

I didn't say "from scratch". I used the m4 macros to create a cf, like everyone did at the time. Using the default file would only work if you still used email programs that read raw mbox files, had no email lists, and needed no interesting aliasing or vacation script behavior. Oh, and ran in an environment where it was reasonable to assume someone's canonical email address could be found via the equivalent of "echo "${USER}@${HOST#.}".

Very few production systems could get away with that; writing a sendmail.cf was standard practice. And with m4, you usually spoke of "writing" a file where today we'd call it "configuring" a file; either way it was taking boilerplate and replacing bits with things that were right for your situation. I assume you wouldn't have had an issue with my writing that I'd "configured" the sendmail.cf. That's all I did.

> > ... that used the nice long self-documenting option and variable names available in Sendmail 8 rather than the cryptic punctuation-mark codes that had been used in Sendmail 5

> Good system administrators stick to conservative, portable subsets of configuration and scripting languages, rather than bleeding edge stuff.

Hmm, you either weren't administering SunOS in the mid-90's or you're forgetting some details. SunOS still came with Sendmail 5 years* after best practice was to use Sendmail 8. Check out the O'Reilly Sendmail book of the time's pagecount: it was longer than the prior and the later versions because it had to document both. I'm not entirely certain SunOS (as opposed to Solaris) ever was upgraded to Sendmail 8 in the distribution; obviously the people using SunOS still so late were change-averse.

"Bleeding edge" != "the version that all but the most conservative holdouts are using". Also, remember that this was the same period we were doing the rsh/rlogin conversion to SSH. Sendmail 5 still had known security issues that were fixed in Sendmail 8. We were used to replacing system components when what the OS vendor was shipping us was literally dangerous to run.

And Sendmail 8's Sendmail 5 compatibility mode was simply there for testing; it was never intended to be used production long-term, so using a least-common-denominator sendmail.cf wouldn't have been "conservative and portable"; it would have been risky, bordering on malpractice.

> Since SunOS came with Sendmail 5, the upgraded Sendmail 8 should have been installed in some custom location with its own path so that it coexists with the stock Sendmail, and is not perturbed if the OS happens to upgrade that.
> A good syadmin would stick that in some /usr/local/bin type local directory, and not overwrite /usr/bin/sendmail.

Again, either you didn't run this installation in the mid-90's or you're forgetting some details. /usr/lib/sendmail (notice the "lib"! Your referring to "/usr/bin/sendmail" suggests to me you definitely weren't running SunOS 4 or have forgotten details; sendmail was never in /usr/bin) couldn't be left alone, as other tools hardcoded that path. The actual executable was there, so symlinking couldn't be used to get around that.