On 14 Feb 2008, at 17:03, Dean Brooks wrote:
> I guess the biggest question is: why?
>
> Are you having to recompile your spf library that often?
>
> Exim has done well to avoid unnecessary complexity, both in
> system-specific coding and porting. I guess my question is what real
> advantage is there to dynamically loading that would outweigh the
> added complexity?
One major reason is that the majority of exim users do not compile
their own copy - they use distribution builds of exim.
Distributors want to keep the required dependencies down to a
minimum. They also want to allow their users flexibility in the way
they use software. A fully featured out copy of exim requires
libraries for several databases, perl, pcre and various special
lookups (NIS, DNS, SPF etc) - which pulls in a lot of other
dependencies.
Hence they end up providing multiple differently tricked out copies of
exim - see the debian light/heavy daemon setup. This also gives us
more difficulty in bug tracking because so many things are compile
time options - although run time options don't actually help this
issue much.
I would like to remove the vast majority of compile time options and
change them to run time options.
Nigel.
--
[ Nigel Metheringham Nigel.Metheringham@??? ]
[ - Comments in this message are my own and not ITO opinion/policy - ]
