Postfix documentation has evolved over time, slowly. The current
organization of hyperlinked READMEs and UNIX-style manpages was
introduced 21 years ago. With a first public release in late 1998,
Postfix is a 21st century product, with deep roots into the past.
Time to throw some generative AI into the mix, I thought. I uploaded
the INSTALL instructions into Google's NotebookLM, and immediately
got a one-paragraph summary that appeared to make sense. This might
be useful for deciding whether to read the full text.
I then asked it to generate a deep-dive audio podcast conversation
for the INSTALL instructions. The result, after a few minutes, was
interesting, for example, at the end where it goes into the details
of myorigin and some other required parameter settings.
https://www.postfix.org/audio/install.mp3 (7 min)
More detailed discussion, based on BASIC_CONFIGURATION_README:
https://www.postfix.org/audio/basic-configuration.mp3 (15 min)
Quote: "mastering master.cf is like earning your black belt in
Postfix administration." I suppose that the AI has a rich choice
of cliches to make the conversation flow.
This is an early result and I expect that it would only get better
over time. That said, there are reasons to not convert each Postfix
document into a podcast.
- Audio is harder to navigate than a collection of hyperlinked texts.
- Audio may be more suitable for shorter clips that focus on one
aspect, and less suitable for presenting a list of definitions such
as those in https://www.postfix.org/postconf.5.html (those definitions
may, however, be useful in a different setting, see below).
- The size of the mp3 files is some 100x the size of the text files
that they were generated from.
A better use of AI may be to upload all the Postfix texts, and to
find out how well AI can answer questions: can it make recommendations,
analyze problems, and how useful are the results? What works better:
text, audio (and in the future, video), and when?
Ideally the source material would be translated into several major
other languages, so that questions can be asked in those languages.
Wietse
PS Google is a past employer. I was not involved in AI.
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