On 21 March 2002, Tony Earnshaw said:
> One thing that has dawned on me in the last few days, is that a great
> number of Linux .rpm and .deb users have problems that "normal" Unix
> people don't have. They paint themselves into corners they can't get out
> of, since they chose the easy option - and that's not there with Exim.
> Exim 4 is far more logical than all the earlier versions, but you still
> can't compare it to an evening out dining at McDonalds. It's no fast
> food.
[...]
> Contention: Exim is not for .deb or .rpm people. Or, they'll have to
> become "proper" Unix people.
I completely disagree.
I also cut my teeth on various flavours of Unix back in the days before
Red Hat and Debian flushed an enormous amount of time-wasting,
effort-duplicating, everyone-compile-it-yourself busy-work down the
toilet. (Yes, I know that Sun, HP, and other commercial Unix vendors
have tried to do this as well. I have attempted to use Solaris'
packaging system, and I nearly peed myself laughing it was so execrably
bad compared to the state of the art on Linux.)
I quite happily use Exim from a Debian package on one system; I built it
myself on two others, because I wanted to run a more recent version. I
*like* pre-packaged binary distribution formats -- they save tremendous
amounts of time and effort.
I think that the sort of people for whom Exim is "no good" are the sort
of people who are unable/unwilling to find things out for themselves,
eg. look in /usr/share/doc/exim, search the web, read the comments in
the sample config file, etc. The same applies to every sophisticated
Unix server I've worked with (Apache, qmail, DJBDNS, and Exim are where
I've spent most of my time). Those tools just aren't designed for
people who refuse to spend some time reading the manual, understanding
the software's design, and *thinking* about how to achieve their aim.
Greg
--
Greg Ward - software developer gward@???
MEMS Exchange http://www.mems-exchange.org
