2011-09-03 In order to manually install masqmail on a Debian system, I in- stalled an mta equivs package, replacing exim. I had been a bit confused because dpkg(8) can't handle conflicts, but [0] (in Ger- man) explained how to do it. Popa3d looks like a POP3 Server of the kind I'm searching for. It was written by Solar Designer, who's already known to me. During the next days I plan to get it running. I came across gutenbach, [1] which takes an approach that is just too obvious after I have seen it. Most problems are already solved in some way; you just need to find the right solution and adjust it to your needs. Against most guesses flex(1) isn't part of GNU, not even GPL- licensed, but under BSD-like terms. This makes it more appealing to me. That's a bit strange, because I'm clearly a ``Free Software guy''. My path towards Unix started at gnu.org. I respect Stallman very much. But although I support the freedom movement of the FSF, I dislike copyleft and even more the GNU software style. It doesn't matter which GNU tool you look at, they're all horrible. When talking about (f)lex, a direct link goes to yacc. Yacc it- self wasn't free. Now we have Heirloom yacc under the CDDL (not the most appealing license neither). And there's bison from GNU. Non of them a fine choice. But there's also byacc, which is writ- ten in plain ANSI-C and released into the public domain. That's software of the kind I like most. I always wondered why one would want to format multiline C com- ments this way: /* * text */ It's just too cumbersome to type. (Note: I use ex-vi, not vim.) Now I understand what the reason is: This way it becomes obvious if some line in the output of grep is within a comment or real code. $ grep split_rcpts src/*.c src/deliver.c: /* split_rcpts(...); */ src/route.c: split_rcpts(...); src/route.c:split_rcpts(...) src/route.c: split_rcpts(...); src/route.c: split_rcpts(...); The first two (!) lines are comments. It took too long until I found that out. Why haven't told me anyone the *reasons*? [0] http://linuxwiki.de/dpkg/Interna [1] http://gutenbach.mit.edu http://marmaro.de/lue/ markus schnalke