Re: [exim] Debian as a 'Special Case' for Exim

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Author: Marc Haber
Date:  
To: exim-users
Subject: Re: [exim] Debian as a 'Special Case' for Exim
On Thu, 17 Feb 2005 06:05:21 +0800, Bill Hacker <wbh@???>
wrote:
>Marc Haber wrote:
>> I am pretty well aware that Debian is unpopular with exim upstream for
>> shipping ancient versions and for using a non-standard configuration
>> scheme since we need to be runnable out of the box.
>
>Exim, from generic tarball (three or four boxen now on the snapshot),
>ports, or pkgsrc is 'runnable out of the box' on the *BSD's (including
>newbie DragonFlyBSD)
>with nothing more than:


... a static IP address
... valid DNS
... mostly unfiltered access to the public internet
... a non-NAT setup

which is not the case for the majority of Debian installations.

>Too many workstations think they are 'servers' and should be running
>only MUA's, not MTA's.


Too many UNIX applications expect to be able to send mail by just
calling /usr/sbin/sendmail, which calls for a local MTA.

>So how and why is Debian so different from the *BSD's (as a server OR
>workstation) or OS X (as a workstation) - or other Linuxes, even,


Debian has the Debconf frontend, which is mandatory to use, and other
ways of integrating debconf with exim's rather big, monolithic
configuration have shown not to be practical.

>...that is has to use stale Exim releases,


Please see Debian's release policy.

> and/or non-standard
>configurations/toolsets to be 'runnable out of the box'?


We don't expect our users to edit a multi-hundred line config file.

>- but 'runnable out of the box' does not compute as a rationale for
>breaking something.


We didn't break anything.

Greetings
Marc

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