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

[I can't speak for the developer team, so this is my personal take]

On Wed, 2007-12-05 at 11:38 +0000, David Restall - System Administrator
wrote:
> 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.

Twas ever thus. The -future list never really got off the ground, since
the future seems to be a moving target!

> 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.

And it still is. A lot has changed over the last few months, not only
has Philip retired but the entire exim.org infrastructure - web, mail,
version control, repository - has been changed, primarily courtesy of
the nice people at Cambridge and a *lot* of work by Nigel Metheringham,
ably assisted by several others.

> 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.

There's never been a "typical release cycle". Releases tend to happen
when they are required - if a lot of bugs have been fixed, or new
features added for example. Nothing specific has happened recently that
warrants a rapid release - and if you look back at the last few, 4.68,
4.67 and 4.66 were all separated by four months between releases.
Extrapolating that gives us 4.69 sometime in the next month or so
(although I'm not on -maintainers, so this is speculation!).

> 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).

I am not aware of any security issues in 4.68, so it's as good a
decision as sticking with a kernel on a system which has no local users
likely to try brute-force privilege escalation. Sometimes there really
is no point chasing the latest, greatest, bleeding-edge code; sticking
with what you know is good is the pragmatic (and risk-assessed!)
approach. 4.68 has been stable, and had several new features in it which
enabled the ACLs in particular to become significantly more powerful.

> Is it time to consider alternatives to Exim as my MTA of choice ?

Maybe, maybe not ;-)

> 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 ?

What do *you* want to happen?

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

I'm not. 4.68 is a bloody good piece of code. As and when something
compels me to look to change it, maybe I'll drive 4.69 (or something
else) forward.

What will *you* do?

Graeme