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


> To me, Exim is now at the point of many successful open source projects:
> It is mature and widespread, there are very few bugs, and it attracts
> lots of people who cry that nobody fulfills their wishes for free, be it
> reading the manual or implementing new features. Philip did both, and
> with memorable patience. It was to be expected that nobody else would.
>
> A central place to report bugs is good, but bugzilla rises the expectation
> somebody will care, and the false impression Exim is full of bugs, only
> because there are many open reports, few, if any, of them being serious.
> How about dropping bugzilla and the wishlist, too?

You're kidding, right? A project that no longer develops can, for all
intents and purposes, be dropped because it will not be able to adapt to
an ever-changing world.

Look at domainkeys, for example. As far as I can tell, it's still not
easy to do with exim, so when smaller shops come to a decision to
implement DK they might have to use a different MTA.

And if *nobody* is willing to help triage bugzilla, then you might as
well admit to the fact that nobody is interested in exim enough any more
to care about adapting it to a changing world, so when new requirements
come up you would move to a new MTA.

As for the VCS debate, git certainly makes it easier to "fork" exim for
locally developed features and be able to merge new "mainline"
development (if it exists) or have other people pick say Redhat's tree
as their new upstream. Just as an example. Ultimately, either somebody
is still interested in doing things under the exim.org hat or the
software will end up being maintained elsewhere, which wouldn't be the
end of the world.

Stopping development, feature tracking, adaptations to new developments
and thus effectively declaring exim EOL, on the other hand, would be.

johannes