On Thu, 01 Jul 2004 19:57:48 PDT, Denis Dimick said: > I do find it "funny" that sendmail and BIND have been thrown out in the > e-mails (don't think it was you) But these two applications are some of > the most buggy bits of code ever written. Yes, they've had bugs. The point is that they are *not* the buggiest bits of code ever written. Remember that we're talking about programs that provide a complicated service to network clients, and thus prone to all sorts of odd race condition bugs that might crop up on some system or other. And then there's the fact that a lot of bugs get found in those packages just because a lot of people *look* at that code. Surf over to sourceforge, grab 8 or 10 projects at random, and start auditing and bug counting. Or think about all the postings we've seen that say "I looked at it for 15 minutes, found 3 exploitable format string bugs and 5 buffer overruns, got bored and gave up". If you think Sendmail and Bind are the buggiest, you've obviously not been around long enough to see some of the *truly* ugly and just plain screwed up code out there. I suspect that a ton of bugs lurk in procmail, only concealed by the fact that anybody who reads the source code out loud has to make a saving throw or accidentally summon He Who Must Not Be Named, or some other creeping-horror C'thulhu creature... Or look at the Javascript and VB and PHP code out there sometime, and ask what would happen if the authors of THOSE tried writing a 90K or 200K line piece of software, armed only with caffeine, delusions about their ability, and a 'Learn Foo in 21 Days" book...
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