At 8:46 AM -0400 7/28/01, Greg Matheson is rumored to have typed:
I agree it is confusing.
No, it isn't; you simply don't understand the convention.
#foreign_submit = yes ##foreign_submit
This means that:
#foreign_submit = yes
...is the pre-set default, and:
##foreign_submit
...will _change_ the default value and do something differently than the "stock" SmartList setup does. Note that ALL THE WAY THROUGH the rc.custom file, this convention is followed for all of the flags...this isn't something arbitrarily done in one instance, but rather runs through the entire rc.custom file to show you the default settings on the flags.
Again, this tells you what the default value of the variable is, without wasting the processing time to re-set it to the same value it already has. Yes, it's copied from rc.init, but there it's _necessary_ to set the variables (that's why it's called rc.INIT); in rc.custom, if you ain't changing it, why re-set it to the value it already contains? I realize with today's processor-wasteful programming styles popularized by the authors of operating systems that require multiple wasted intepreted layers to do anything, it seems foreign, but procmail/SmartList is written to be as fast, small, and processor-friendly as humanly possible, even to the point of not resetting a variable when it isn't necessary. If you have a gighertz machine with gigs of RAM you probably don't care about wasted cycles...fortunately, the maintainers of procmail/SmartList are still more interested in efficiency over sloppiness. If Windows programmers wrote the same way, Windows would run on a 50mHz 386 at almost the speed the current version does on modern machines...imagine how fast it could run on THOSE!
This should really be a FAQ, since it's all _terribly_ helpful; it allows you to easily read how the defaults are set up - no one coming to SmartList seems to grasp how this works, and how really helpful this is. If this doesn't qualify as a FAQ, I don't know what does.
Charlie