On Mon, Aug 20, 2001 at 04:46:44AM -0500, Robin S. Socha wrote:
> * Henning Brauer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> > On Sun, Aug 19, 2001 at 05:29:58PM -0000, D. J. Bernstein wrote:
> >> For the record: I have authorized _none_ of the third-party patches
> >> that are available for my software. Most of those patches are
> >> garbage.
> > You are forcing people to patch with not releasing an updated qmail.
> Get real. He's Grandmaster DJB. And you are free to use his software. He's
> not exactly forcing you to use it, is he. Especially since there are secure,
> reliable and fast alternatives like sendmail.
Of course nobody forces me to use qmail. But if I decide to use qmail and
need these features I need to patch. This is OK for features seldom needed.
But one should really think about TLS, SMTP AUTH and some others. They are
or should be used widely. Shouldn't they be part of a decent MTA? What about
the ipme fix?
Distributing a tarball with outdated installation instructions just causes
confusion. Ranting against third-party documentation in general and thus
including LWQ, in fact the standard qmail documentation and very good, is at
least not fair. Saying "most of those patches are garbage" (which, after
all, is true for many of them) isn't fair given that stock qmail misses
_some_ (not many) real-world features.
In fact stock qmail can be used without any patching in many situations. But
djb leads anyone to the impression patching qmail is bad and always
unneeded, and this is simply not true.
I personally don't have problems adopting qmail to my needs through patching
or coding myself. In fact I've done this for qmail-ldap multiple times. But
there are _lots_ of users out here needing a feature not included in stock
qmail. Once got the answer "you need to patch" they often start patching
much to much (Oh, this patch looks fine, maybe i need it, big concurrency
sounds fine, take it, big todo sounds fine, take it...), and this causes
many many problems easily avoidable.
--
* Henning Brauer, [EMAIL PROTECTED], http://www.bsws.de *
* Roedingsmarkt 14, 20459 Hamburg, Germany *
Unix is very simple, but it takes a genius to understand the simplicity.
(Dennis Ritchie)
