On Tuesday 05 July 2005 14:18, Listas barbarojo wrote:
> It has been developed in a modular way that makes it extreamly easy to add
> functionality to it and much more.
Wrong. I has been developed in such a way that functionality has to be added
in the form of patches, and it is suffering greatly from age now. qmail is
very powerful and vpopmail makes it relatively simple to use, but it is
stagnant, old, hard to use without patches and just plain old doesn't work at
all if you try to use the original source on a modern system (it'll fail to
compile or do strange things).
DJB let this baby into the wild, but didn't allow it to find its own way. If
it weren't secure and relatively well supported, it would die. I'll go a
step further, if it hadn't been a godsend in 1996 compared to Sendmail, it
wouldn't have gone anywhere. But, times have moved on! DJB should let it go
under some license - maybe BSD or GPL, so that the community can do something
with it. UCSPI-TCP and Daemontools, too.
It's also hard to program for. A lot of DJB's code relationships are like a
foreign language. Not that it's wrong, just that it's difficult.
> Qmail is a master piece, I can assure you that. I don't know why most of
> the distributors do not include qmail but nobody can deny that qmail has
> became the most powerfull and secure mailserver ever and has been growing
> very very fast.
It was a masterpiece in 1996. Now it's just a solid mail server with just
enough functionality added by patch maintainers to get the job done. No
doubt it's a workhorse, I have at least 10 machines using qmail for Internet
e-mail, but I've seen strange things in the 9 years I've been using it.
I'm relatively happy with vpopmail + qmail + patches, but saying that qmail is
some wondrous software package is bunk. It's looking mighty old these
days... vpopmail and qmail should be one package that gets distributed along
with modernization patches, and it would be that way if DJB didn't have his
claws of death on a piece of code that he last updated in 1997. That's
abandonment, and the software really is starting to creak in terms of
relevancy.
(go to qmail.org, i'm the one who designed the look of it... don't blame me if
you don't like the layout, though...)
--
Cheers,
Steve |President & Systems Administrator, Kingston Online Services
|(e pluribus unix) Multiple-T3/OC3 URL: http://www.kos.net/
|Business and Education partners in SouthEastern Ontario
|
|"Through the firewall, out the router, down the OC3, across the
|backbone, bounced from satellite, it's nothing but net."
