On Tue, 20 Sep 2005 08:53:29 -0400, Marc Sherman
<msherman@???> wrote:
>2) The Debian package maintainers have customized and modified the Exim
>config mechanisms quite aggressively, in an effort to handhold those
>same clueless newbies. By doing so, they've obsoleted much of the
>existing documentation and faq material available on the net for exim.
I have to object about that. Most documentation and FAQ material only
quote a router, a transport or an ACL snippet, which is as easily put
into our configuration scheme as it is in a hand-crafted exim.conf.
The issue is that our exim is useable for people who didn't read a
line of docs, and simply don't know the difference between a router
and a transport. That problem would be there as well if our
configuration scheme would operate on a monolithic exim.conf.
>This has the effect of steepening the learning curve quite drastically
>for people who are just beginning to leave clueless newbie territory.
All people need is to read the docs. They don't.
>This problem is easily avoided by those with clue, who can simply
>install a standard exim config file as /etc/exim4/exim4.conf. All of
>the debian config mechanism will still be there on disk, but you can
>ignore it.
Of course, the _really_ clueful people use the gazillions of hooks
that we provide to get their own customized config _and_ our updates
to the parts they didn't change.
>3) Debian's incredibly long stable release cycles mean that there are
>very significant periods of time where Debian will be shipping as
>"stable" a very outdated (and possibly buggy) version of Exim. This is
>exacerbated by the fact that the actual "make release here" point is
>chosen by Debian's release managers without much real warning (or
>rather, too much real warning, leading to a wolf-crying situation), and
>as a result, Debian will often ship as stable a relatively immature x.x0
>or x.x1 release.
Debian potato had exim 3.12, Debian woody shipped with exim 3.35,
IIRC, which is hardly a "relatively immature" release, and Debian
sarge has 4.50 which works actually very well.
>For example, the current Debian stable release
>contains exim 4.50. While many of the fixes from 4.51 were backported
>into Debian's 4.50 package before Debian went stable, it would probably
>have been better served to stick with 4.44, which had had 4 minor point
>releases to stabilize before the major new features of 4.50 were introduced.
Do you want to maintain the package? If we're doing really as bad a
job as you suggest, I'm happy to step back for you. Just say so.
>This _will_ be a problem for you if you choose to install Debian stable.
Why will it be a problem?
Greetings
Marc
--
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