On Tue, May 23, 2006 at 11:40:42PM -0700, Empty wrote:
> Exim has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years. It seems complex at
> first but only if you've never waded through Sendmail configs ;)

Ah, I knew I forgot at least one fairly popular one...

> Right, but you can patch to your hearts content. Qmail is
> free-as-in-beer. It must be distributed in *unmodified* source form,
> which hurts it with many distributions. Not to mention an unpatched
> qmail install is horribly broken in todays environment- a lot of the
> choices djb made in '99 aren't valid anymore.

I guess that's my big problem. Patches don't make it upstream as in the
rest of the open source / free software world. It's a PITA for any
developer wanting to fix something or add functionality. It's a PITA for
users because you pretty much *have* to use something besides stock
qmail.

> Qmail does have a few design features that make it very attractive. For
> one, the bits run as nonprivileged users. The parts that run as root
> only do so long enough to grap the SMTP port or change permissions. Any
> kind of program delivery is executed as the user being delivered to,
> instead of root, which limits the vulnerability third party bits can add
> to your server. It is also designed to never ever lose a message it has
> accepted delivery for, short of misconfiguration or massive disk failure.

Postfix also addresses these issues in a similar manner. Good idea to
take a look at what has kept breaking sendmail and avoid those problems
with a ground-up redesign...

> > Philosophical differences aside, the practical
> > upshot is that djb code doesn't attract the same kind of community that
> > truly free software does.
> 
> I have to call bullcrap on this. There are four major guides to setting
> up qmail- lifewithqmail, vpopmail, qmailrocks, and qmailtoaster (which
> IIRC is mostly vpopmail). Qmails ultra modular design makes it easy to
> slice bits of it out and replace them, for example you can cut out the
> smtpd and replace it, or the qmail-local bit. If you think there's no
> qmail community, go look at the wealth of projects and bits on qmail.org.

I didn't say qmail didn't have a community. It does. But I don't think
it's quite the same. Though I'm not too familiar with it, I don't find
the lists/forums/etc. as helpful. YMMV.

Not meaning or wanting a flame war or even a heated discussion. Aside
from a few facts these are my opinions on djb's licensing and the
results on the community. Different people fit well into different
communities. Please feel free to respond. Just letting you know this is
NOT a religious issue with me and I'm not trying to provoke.

-- 
Darrin Chandler            |  Phoenix BSD Users Group
dwchandler@stilyagin.com   |  http://bsd.phoenix.az.us/
http://www.stilyagin.com/  |
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