This repsonse really has only half to do with Courier, but when you really get down tobusiness, most binary packages distributed with any distribution (especially debian)do not work or behave exactly as the "stock" configure, make, make install, would have thembehaving. There are few packages that don't include some sort of tweak, changed"defaults", initscripts, location of conffiles, etc.
If I intend to compile and install a piece of software from source code that is destined for a server with a largenumber of users, it is in my best interest to be intimately familiar with the operation ofthat software. I usually start by looking at the Debian packager's diff (even if I'm notcompiling for debian) as they often contain easy and tested alterations I like. A lot ofthese modifications never go (and don't even belong) upstream. As far as the problem of a patch causing "an extra iteration of attention from the tech staff", I would have tosuggest looking into getting a tech staff that considers patches and staged test setupsstandard procedure when installing software. Then, at least you are paying for an extrahour of their time versus countless money wasted on support staff trying to BS a response ina situation where the customer is probably right on the money! Now the ontoppic part -- Personally, I support Sam coding the software however he wants. If the style is toopurist for you, then patch, or use something else. Start a community patch to include the"non-standard" features people want that Sam doesnt want to include. Lots of projects havesomething like this. It seems a lot of the anger here is misdirected at Sam for notimmediately including a feature that was never there in the first place, simply becausethere is a hack for it. Mail used to BOUNCE! Error messages were hard coded in the sourcefile! Now it gets delivered in an ultra-sane and paranoid manner. Think writing a web browser. It's easiest to start from a point at which your browser is a 100% correct parserfor perfectly formated and versioned HTML, then add the features that allow it to deal withthe quirks of webpages in the real world: missing tags, bugs in popular browsers, mixedhtml DTD versions, etc. This courier situation is no different. Please use your energy wisely. Instead of complaining, why not expand the 4 line patch into something that isactually complete and includable! Maybe it adds the 8 bit MIME header and encodes or adds an"X-Warning: Not 7-bit clean" header to messages that violate the rule if the option is on.Maybe it includes the courierwebadmin code to toggle this setting, and the documentationto explain it to people. Maybe it puts the entry in the sample conf files. Maybe it givesoptions for bypassing or skipping other RFC checks too. It's not like there aren't optionsin courier already that aren't exactly 100% RFC correct (See the BOFH* options forinstance), It's just not on Sam's agenda right now, but it's not like you can't ever expectthe option to be there. I just wish everyone would chill out and stop griping, already. There really is no point, and all you're going to do is piss Sam off to the point at which hedoesn't care anymore. Then you really will have somehting to complain about. Kudos to you, Sam for your software. It is definately the best system for me, and the tiny patches Iapply now are nothing compared to the monster hacks I had to use on other software to achievethe same degree of functionality! Thanks. John Laur > My concern is for the courier mail package as a whole. > > I think it's the best mail system available and Sams > support on this list is excellent. My argument is simply > that Sam make this RFC2045 check OPTIONAL otherwise any > ISP with enough clients will NOT be able to run a stock > standard courier install. That means all those RPM and DEB > based servers out there will require an extra iteration of > attention from tech staff that may prevent the adoption of > the courier system in the first place... that bothers me > because I want to see this system deployed as widely as > possible so it gets major support from all involved and > remains the best mail system on the planet. > > I am not the first and I certainly will not be the last > person to take issue with this problem. > > Please note this is not an imflamatory response. > > --markc _______________________________________________ courier-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/courier-users
