On Tue, 2 Dec 2003, Marc Perkel wrote:
> I don't know how the process works but why isn't exiscan part of the
> exim code rather than a 3rd party patch? I'm sure a lot of us world
> rather have it in there. What's the process on this?
(1) Not everybody wants/uses Exiscan (though of course it could be a
build configuration option).
(2) Tom maintains it and extends it. It is helpful to have somebody else
take care of this body of code independently. Originally, of course, he
implemented it as a local_scan() add-on which was not a patch. That is
the way I first conceived of 3rd parties adding scanning into Exim.
Maybe there should be a more "formal" API that allows 3rd party code to
add additional commands to the ACL mechanism without having to patch the
base code.
(3) However, as I posted on this list some time ago, I feel that the
time has come to take stock of the way Exim is maintained, and to plan
for the future. I shall turn 60 next May, and therefore it is not so
many years before I retire. At the moment, I can just about handle the
maintenance and development, but it does not seem to be slackening - at
one time I thought it might. Therefore, as previously posted, when I get
back from Australia at the end of January, I intend to write a document
that discusses possible future maintenance strategies and sets out the
problems that I see in moving from the current "one-man-band"
operation[*] to to a more distributed way of doing it. There is no
hurry. We can take as long as necessary to discuss what the future
direction should be, and then start working towards it. I think we
should include in the discussion third party add-ons like Exiscan (I
hope Tom agrees!). Another example is the code that supports Sieve - at
present Michael sends me patches and I install them in the base.
Philip
[*] Preview: the big problems are going to be the documentation and the
testing suite.
--
Philip Hazel University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10@??? Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.
Get the Exim 4 book: http://www.uit.co.uk/exim-book
