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

Marc Haber writes ("Re: [exim] Debian as a 'Special Case' for Exim"):
> Your friend Ian Jackson is the one who designed the dpkg conffile
> handling and should be able to explain why it is hard to keep a
> multi-hundred-line config file under conffile control while allowing
> local changes _and_ distribution upgrades.

So don't do that then. I'm also the person who wrote the original
config generator for Debian's smail package (before Exim existed). I
knew that the best that could sensibly be done was to provide a way to
generate a plausible initial config, which the sysadmin would edit by
hand for more complex cases. So, that's what smailconfig does.

You can't run a nontrivial mail system without knowing enough to edit
the config file (and that comes with opinions about how to do it).
For the Debian package to try to take over that task is a mistake.

Fundamentally, Debian is not a special case. Or, if it is, it should
only be because Debian does it right when others get it wrong. That's
not what we're seeing here.

Ian.