[Mailman-Users] txt files and database

[Heather Madrone]

At 8:46 AM -0700 6/23/05, Carl Zwanzig wrote:
>No, it really doesn't. Without getting in the minds of the developers:
>* virtually every OS is packaged with facilities for reading/writing text files
>* text files are dead easy to fix
>* text files are fast for most operations, esp sequential reads and appends
>* if you don't need to modify/remove rows of a table, a database becomes
>  extra overhead
>* just about all system managers/admins understand text files
>* you can embed documentation in the text files
>* text files are easy to program
>* most, if not all, enterprise-quality MTAs configure from text files
>
>I'm sure there are more reasons, but I guess that might not answer the
>question, either.

They're in Unix mailbox format, which has been a standard on many
systems (Eudora still uses it on my Mac) since the 1970s.  You need a
really good reason to go from a standard format to a non-standard format.

-- 
Heather Madrone  (heather at madrone.com)  http://www.madrone.com

Whenever a question asks "Either / or?"
The answer is usually "Both...and more."