On Wed, 2006-07-12 at 07:54 -0700, Empty wrote:
> Craig White wrote:
> > My opinion is that installing Qmail on a Red Hat based system is plain
> > stupid since you lose all of the benefits of reasoned and maintained
> > package management. Once you stray from the standard packages, you
> > assume all responsibility for updating it whereas if it were a Red Hat
> > system, you would merely do 'yum update' or 'up2date -u' and get all the
> > updates installed.
> 
> Well, if DJB ever releases a security patch for qmail(which hasn't
> happened in 8 years now) I guess I will have to deal with that. Since
> DJB put up a $10k reward for someone to root a box through qmail back
> then and the reward remains unclaimed I'm thinking I don't have much to
> worry about in this regard.
----
I understand DJB's philosophy.

I believe that it undermines the philosophy of the Free Software license
and the movement itself and that is where my objection comes in. Free
Software not only allows modification to the source code itself, but
also permits recycling of the source code in other similarly/compatibly
licensed software and has a useful life beyond the original authors and
it's restrictive license. I believe the distinction of 'free' is very
much evident in DJB software.

DJB's software is 'as is' and cannot be distributed except as is and you
have to patch away afterwards.

If the notion that the best software to use is that which is never been
security challenged, then I probably should just quit using apache, etc.

Ultimately, I don't understand the notion of using a package management
distribution and then going off package management for large,
significant portions. That seems nonsensical to me. I think it's far
worse to suggest that concept to someone groping with an installation
which in essence would then deprive them of the normal support channels
of the distribution that they are using.

Craig

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