simplicity vs safety with complexity

[Bill McClain]

On Mon, 24 Jan 2005 19:49:00 -0500
David Relson <relson at osagesoftware.com> wrote:

> Would you rather have 
> 
> 1) a wordlist that's simple, easy to backup, but vulnerable to
> software and hardware crashes; or
> 
> 2) a wordlist that offers crash protection but is complex to maintain,
> backup, ... 

People have varying needs. As a single-user home office, #1 was fine for
me but I am using #2 now and it works well. Using thresh_update it
takes 6 weeks to fill up a 10MB log. A large system administrator might
value crash protection more, but also suffer from the increased
management burden.

I would be tempted to default to #1, with #2 available for those who
want it, but as Boris says, this complicates the supporting utilities
and docs. You'll be supporting two products. 

What other common tools have an environment that must be managed as
carefully? Nothing I use, although there are places I don't disturb
because I know I shouldn't.

If #2 is to be the default, we should learn from the support issues that
have appeared on the list and: (a) provide a prominent and simply stated
howto for new users, to the effect: "Don't mess with the bogofilter data
files! Use only the provided utilities for backup, etc!" and (b) find
some way to delete old log files automatically. I haven't looked at the
code but I presume the db library handles log closure and creation
automatically, beyond control of the application, so I'm not sure how
this could be done programatically.

In brief: I'm fine either way, but for new users, you either need the
easy option #1, or to make #2 easier.

-Bill
-- 
Sattre Press                                      Pagan Papers
http://sattre-press.com/                    by Kenneth Grahame
info at sattre-press.com          http://sattre-press.com/pp.html