Re: [Exim] "driver" concept?

JP Kelly wrote:
> I agree the driver concept is pretty difficult to grasp.
> I have edited my config file and gotten it to do what I want through
> looking at examples and trial and error but as far as understanding the
> basic concepts of drivers I think I am only 25 % there.
> I even bought the ORielly Exim book but my brain seems to lock up while
> reading it.
> An "Exim Drivers for Dummies" would be nice.

What's so difficult about this?

An driver specifies which type of
transport/router/authenticator(/director for exim3) you want to use.

This allows you to defines routers that do basicly the same, but differ
in some way, or do different transports, for a pipe command created by a
userfilter, or an delivery-pipe (like delivery to procmail).

The driver specifies the basic behaviour of the
router/transport/authenticator, and you can tune it with the options.

Exim uses drivers to have an abstract interface to whatever you want to
do. This makes exim so flexible ;)

My personal point of view is, that exim itself is a framework, that
provides you basic SMTP/queuing functionality, everything else is
configureable.

In example, you don't have just one way to do aliasing (using the
redirect-driver), you can easily do aliasing by LDAP/MYSQL/DBM-files in
one config, depending on whatever you want, with multiple routers, suing
the redirect driver.

ciao