[exim] The next Exim release - will there be one ?

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Author: David Restall - System Administrator
Date:  
To: exim-users
Subject: [exim] The next Exim release - will there be one ?
Hi,

I noticed Marc Perkel's post a few weeks ago about the ongoing life
of Exim and he was swiftly diverted to exim-dev. There isn't much on
there about what is happening in the future and what the plans are etc.
I also note that exim-future is under-nourished with messages.

A lot of us out here are just ordinary sysadmins trying to keep things
up and running and getting by on a day to day basis and things like
Exim are core to what we do. Most of these things (including Exim)
are stable, well written and supported - and still maintained and
undergoing development.

The main driving force behind Exim was Phil, Phil has retired and to
me as an end user has left a bit of a void. There doesn't appear to
be any single co-ordinator or champion for Exim anymore and it looks
as if everything has stopped. There isn't a lot of Exim 5 going on,
4.68 has been out for a long time now, if Phil was still running it I
feel sure there would have been a 4.69 at least looking at his typical
release cycles. There was a little flurry of activity earlier in the
year at Phil's retirement as to the future but since then nothing.

I'm in the process of building a new server and building and configuring
Exim on it, it will be 4.68, what is bothering me is whether this is
a good decision - I have been running Exim for almost 15 years so am
familiar with it, I have also run Sendmail and am familiar with that too
(I prefer Exim BTW).

Is it time to consider alternatives to Exim as my MTA of choice ?
Every sysadmin that uses Exim must be asking themselves this - this
list and the other lists are not answering the future questions and we
as a community need to be getting our heads out of the sand and making
decisions about what we are going to do. I would love to get into code
bashing and development - but don't have the spare time, we don't have a
replacement for Phil and I can't see anybody backing Exim financially to
keep it going so what really is going to happen ?

Who else is considering alternatives and what are you looking at ?

Regards,



David
exim/2007-12-05.tx                                             exim-users
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