On 23 Dec 1998 06:40:20 -0000, D. J. Bernstein wrote:
>I tried to work with Donnie Barnes. I put a lot of effort into making
>qmail distributable in binary form. But he isn't willing to guarantee
>cross-platform compatibility. It saddens me that he hasn't been honestly
>telling his users the nature of our disagreement.
RedHat has SECURITY announcements. Often, the problem is that the
package is screwed up, not that the source program itself is.
Directories have the worng permission, etc. They fix it and the
announcement clearly states that it was the _package_ not the
_program_. This would not give qmail a bad name. RedHat may well screw
it up, but that's [mainly] their problem.
RedHat already distribute "non-free" packages, i.e. packages with
restrictions above GPL. They do not need to make qmail _the_ redhat
MTA, just make it avaialble as an option.
What we need is one good and secure rpm. I want maildir, not some
stupid mbox spool. RedHat are likely to do the latter for ease of
sendmail compatibility. So, I'll keep building qmail on my [redhat
linux] system. However, I'd rather the rest of the word used a
partially screwed up qmail than sendmail.
So, DJB and DB are both 100% correct. A compromise, is worth more than
the sum of the merits of both points of view.
-Sincerely, Fred
(Frederik Lindberg, Infectious Diseases, WashU, St. Louis, MO, USA)
