Re: [exim-dev] Development blockage...

Jaco van der Schyff wrote:

On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 10:11:56AM +0100, Alex Kiernan wrote:


Putting my THUS/Demon hat on, we clearly have lots of exim in service
and a vested interest in dealing with any security issue in a timely
manner. If a security issue came up I'd expect we'd be able to throw
resource at diagnosis/fix in a short time frame, so long as it was in
an area which affected us.


Where/who are these resources. Are we hoping that they would step-up in
the event of a security issue? I forsee alot of administrators
switching to other MTAs, when they get spooked by these issues.



We all know the advantages exim has over any other MTA. It is
precisely these advantages that will mean that admins will, in my
opinion, step up to meet the need.
Either that, or exim will wither on the vine. This is the way the free
software ecosystem works, and any admin worth his salt knows this.
But I very, very much doubt the latter will occur, given the extremely
high quality of Exim's design and implementation. As someone else
said, it is almost certainly the thought of having to step into
Philip's large shoes that is holding people back. His depth of
knowledge of exim is (obviously) unparalleled, but more than that his
understanding of what makes a quality software product is what's kept
it ahead of the competition all these years.
I'd like to add my vote for a code-fest if necessary - it did wonders
for FreePBX a few months back. I haven't looked at the feature
request/user error/genuine bug split across bugzilla, so perhaps that
would be the first target for a blitz.
I'm a one-time average-goodish 'C' programmer now mostly doing sysadm
and support for SMEs, but given what Exim's done for me over the
years, I'll offer any assistance I can swith pulling the plunger up
and down.
Mike Pellatt