In terms of the points made by Marc Sherman; I made use of the
exim4-docs package for a lot of my initial tweaking. It was very straight
forward; and for the Debian specific notes, they were easy to follow. For
the release schedule, I have not used Debian distribution long enough to
comment.
I do like the job Marc Haber and Andreas Metzler have done with Exim
in Debian especially the hooks; I make extensive use of them. This has so
far provided very smooth upgrades and maintenance for me for the past year
(I have been running Debian Sarge in a "production" development lab before
converting all other systems recently).
I have had only two very minor issues:
1. The application name update-exim.conf :-)
2. The local configuration files in a split config, will not
pick up a file ending in .rul unless there is a file without that extension
also present. This causes me to have some local configuration files with a
.rul when over-riding and others without, when not over-riding the built in
templates. (This did not bug me enough to put in a bug yet.)
Tim
-----Original Message-----
From: exim-users-bounces@??? [
mailto:exim-users-bounces@exim.org] On
Behalf Of Marc Haber
Sent: Tuesday, September 20, 2005 11:37 AM
To: exim-users@???
Subject: Debian exim (was: [exim] which linux for exim)
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
--
-------------------------------------- !! No courtesy copies, please !!
-----
Marc Haber | " Questions are the | Mailadresse im Header
Mannheim, Germany | Beginning of Wisdom " |
http://www.zugschlus.de/
Nordisch by Nature | Lt. Worf, TNG "Rightful Heir" | Fon: *49 621 72739834
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