In <Pine.LNX.4.21.0007112011490.1812-100000@???> kalum@??? (Kalum Somaratna aka Grendel) writes:
>Well I have been on the qmail list and although DJB and the postfix guy
>tend to fly into awesome fits of rage sometimes (that may be the reason
>for your above comment) ;) I find that there are indeed willing to
>listen...
I think what he was getting at was not an unreasonableness, but rather a
flexibility. If you go look at qmail for instance, it has one maintained
version, and hundreds of patches from other people to make it do things
that don't fit the author's vision. Some patches appear "blessed" in
that they are linked to from the official web site, while others are
only found by searching the qmail list archives. (this may just be a web
site management issue, I don't know. That's fine if your needs suit
qmail's capabilities, but as I recently found when taking over a site
where the owner had installed qmail with LDAP patches and a few other
patches installed, it quickly becomes a problem when upgrading or when
things start to go wrong. Upgrading any of the patches can break the
other patches and then you have to start hand resolving the diffs to get
it all to compile and hopefully work.
With exim, patches to add more functionality are regularly incorporated
into the main tree by Philip, usually after a bit of a rewrite to fit
his vision of how it should work. Thus I can be assured of the latest
version always compiling and generally always working with each new
version. In the case of the LDAP installation I took over, something
caused the LDAP mail to bog down horribly, and neither I or the original
admin was able to track down what was causing the problem. That leads me
to the third thing I really like about exim, and that's it's debugging.
Like smail before it, exim is incredibly detailed in it's debug output
and this makes tracking down and solving problems incredibly quick for
the administrator, and also for the maintainer, as a there's nothing
like a full debug log mailed to you to help you see where the problem
is.
The only problem I have with exim is that I find the powerful expansion
operators very difficult to work with, but I know that's because of my
tiny brain, as I can see you couldn't make something that powerful much
simpler and still have the flexibility it provides.
--
Artificial Intelligence stands no chance against Natural Stupidity.
GAT d- -p+(--) c++++ l++ u++ t- m--- W--- !v
b+++ e* s-/+ n-(?) h++ f+g+ w+++ y*
