On Fri, 2007-06-01 at 19:33 -0700, Robin H. Johnson wrote: > On Fri, Jun 01, 2007 at 01:02:03PM -0400, Guy Hulbert wrote: > > On Fri, 2007-06-01 at 09:33 -0700, Robin H. Johnson wrote: [snip] > > What problem(s) are you trying to solve ? The answer for qpsmtpd is > > obvious (to me) but I don't see any reason to replace the rest. > Pain of maintenance. > > > Why not just install qmail ? > A little background here. > > Background > ---------- > Starting nearly 4 years ago, and up until about a month ago, I've been > Gentoo's qmail maintainer. I am _painfully_ aware of the process of > patching qmail. The Gentoo qmail package at it's peak had approximately
This is one problem of not having a binary package format. > 30 different patches, getting it closer to the feature-set presently I think there are 44 patches in etch. However, I have read on qmail.org that only 2 or 3 patches are critical and I suspect that a largish number are required only for qmail-smtpd. One idea I have is to build a separate qmail/qpsmtpd package for debian where excess patches can be dropped. But I won't even look at that until after the next release of qpsmtpd. > available in other more-updated MTAs. [snip] > The problem was, maintaining a build that can apply 30 patches is a LOT > of work. We had to abide by DJB's rules of not modifying the original > qmail tarball, and also wanted to keep patches separate wherever > possible (to allow updating specific patches). That's crazy. [snip] > This got to be so much work, that we didn't get very many revisions of Doh. [snip] > On moving forward > ----------------- > If there is any MTA that I think is closest to a good design, it's > qmail. It's also modular enough that incremental replacement is easily > possible. I have read that postfix has also borrowed much of qmail's design. > > Why move qmail to Perl? For the same exact reason that qpsmtpd is such a > large improvement over qmail-send. Ease of maintenance and plugin > support. Python would be a better choice, IMO. It already has an 'smtpd', which is used for mailman and is asynchronous. However, no work seems to have been done on it since 2.2 and it would need a small refactoring to be useful as a base on which to build a qpsmtpd competitor. The effort required to do this is probably too large, given the smaller python community. > > Here's the rough outline and implementation order I don't think this is unreasonable but at the moment it seems difficult to find enough resources to put out another release of qpsmtpd. [snip] -- --gh
