I do not even imagine my life without procmail, I use it since 20 years, it's kind of basic Unix tool, documented and used everywhere ...
Is it not possible to find a new upstream maintainer for such an important piece of art than just try to bury it ? I would do it if I was anything near good enough to do it (I'm not). Software is under GPL, have you tried to talk to the FSF, they may have a maintainer ? When I think that the Free world has plenty of software developpers to make KDE, Gnome and all their piece of shit small and useless softwares and we talk about burying Procmail. What a failure ! On Tue, Nov 18, 2014 at 12:42:37PM -0800, Philip Guenther wrote: > > Executive summary: delete the procmail port; the code is not safe and > should not be used as a basis for any further work. > > > As people may know, I was the upstream maintainer of procmail back in the > late 1990's though 2001. > > Recent fuzzing efforts have found several bugs in procmail. I was > contacted by the Debian port maintainer. Below you'll find my reply. > > When a change in your own priorities happens over a long enough period of > time, it can be hard to recognize when something you loved no longer > matches your design priorities. These recent reports finally made me > recognize that and think about what could usefully be done with the > procmail source. It's time to retire it. > > > Philip > > > ---------- Forwarded message ---------- > Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2014 02:57:54 -0800 > From: Philip Guenther <pguent...@proofpoint.com> > To: Santiago Vila <sanv...@unex.es> > Cc: Philip Guenther <guent...@sendmail.com>, > Stephen R. van den Berg <s...@cuci.nl>, Jakub Wilk <jw...@debian.org> > Subject: Re: Bug#769938: procmail: NULL pointer dereference (fwd) > > On Tue, 18 Nov 2014, Santiago Vila wrote: > > I received this report from the Debian bug system. > > > > Since I don't usually receive replies for the bug reports I send to > > this address, I'm going to Cc the author and the maintainer as well. > > > > I don't intend to do this for every bug, but this is a segmentation fault. > > In case I didn't say it before: procmail needs an upstream maintainer! > > Hi, this is Philip Guenther. Please remove me from the list of procmail > maintainers: I haven't had write access to the procmail source repository > for at least 13 years and no longer use it. > > > Unfortunately, I don't see procmail as a good base for mail filtering now. > IMO, procmail brought two things to the table at the time: a more > powerful--though obtuse--filtering language, and a better systems base for > accepting and delivering messages. The language is a poor match for the > complexity of modern systems with lots of MIME traffic, while the base > is--IMHO--too complex, too clever, and written in a style that doesn't > attract new maintainers. What were strengths in the past are no longer > valuable and have become liabilities for a program exposed to general > Internet email. > > I learned much from procmail and it filtered a lot of email for me and the > places I worked at, but the world has changed and I moved on years ago. > I recommend others do so as well. > > > Philip Guenther > <guent...@sendmail.com> -- Stéphane Tougard <steph...@unices.org>
