Last month it was 20 years ago that I started writing Postfix code.
After coming to IBM research in November 1996, I spent most of
December and January making notes on paper. I knew that writing a
mail system was more work than any of my prior projects.
The oldest tarball, dated 19970220, contains library functions plus
two early versions of the master daemon. There are 8086 lines of
code, 4204 lines after stripping the comments, and the only
documentation was my pile of hand-written notes.
For comparison, today's Postfix 3.2.0 RC1 release candidate weighs
in at 236533 lines of code, 137257 after stripping comments. The
documentation amounts to 32589 lines of hand-written HTML source,
plus 41878 lines of auto-generated HTML.
Much of today's effort is not visible as new features (thought there
still are enough to make an upgrade worthwhile), but happens behind
the scenes as improvements to internal code, and updated tests to
ensure that future changes won't inadvertantly break something.
Wietse
