Re: QMail and DJB ... was Re: [LIH] any one using djbdns?

[Suresh Ramasubramanian <suresh@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Feb 01, 2001 at 11:43:00PM +0530, Sandip Bhattacharya typed:

>  1. You have an excellent piece of software which is clearly superior
>     with respect to other alternatives.

Debatable, when the alternatives include postfix (and the newer sendmails).  Not to mention exim.

One thing I hate about qmail is its stupid habit of opening multiple smtp
connections for multiple deliveries to a single domain (mail from: rcpt to:
mail from: rcpt to: ... instead of mail from: rcpt to: rcpt to: rcpt to:)

For all that DJB argues that servers should accept no more mail than they can
handle at a time, it is a major pain (esp if you run across a list server
running qmail, to which several hundred of your users are subscribed).

> sit on a Debian or a SUSE box, I would first have to sit down for
> quite a while to figure out where the various stuff are located ... 
 
SuSE is quite similar to redhat - though they are good about not releasing
buggy / security holed versions of whatever they ship.

> > multiple connections to the server and send one copy of the message to
> > each recipient, instead of opening a single connection and sending

I see Raju's raised the main beef people have against qmail.

> I might be stretching things a bit, but why do you expect him to
> incorporate such a basic change for specific situations? Isn't that
> how various packages have become bloated in the past? Look at the size
> of the Qmail distrib and what it can do, as compared to the size of
> sendmail and what extra things THAT could do !!!
 
Size doesnt matter, buddy.  Its the way it works that matters.  I've seen qmail
(and worse, misconfigured qmail) boxen bring down a sendmail server, till
someone adjusts

O MaxDaemonChildren
O ConnectionRateThrottle

qmail is not a good net.neighbor to have around, for that one reason for
starters.  IMHO at least (there are several qmail users who dont agree with me
I suppose) 

> Again ... he doesn't prevent you from modifying your own installation
> of Qmail!! If you like qmail to work in a way, why can't you
> distribute the patch separetely? IMHO, Dan just wants people to know
> that the original package is the qmail as it is commonly found
> elsewhere. Whenever somebody has to put in the patch he is constantly
> reminded that they ARE modifying an original package ... and from here
> on they are responsible for any deviations in qmail behaviour. 
 
That is stupid, IMHO.  Try gnu-pop3d for example, something similar is
happening there (due to a different reason).  If the patches submitted are
_not_ incorporated into the main package, you end up with multiple, totally
different versions of the package.  Then, when the patch maintainer loses
interest, the guy's stuck with an ancient version he doesn't dare upgrade (if
he's not clued enough to hack code and write patches himself)

> Again why does freedom got be either the GNU or BSD way?
 
Why does freedom have to be the DJB way ("Do what you fscking like, only dont
expect me to modify my precious qmail because you have a brilliant idea").

The authors of sendmail / exim etc are much more open about accepting and
incorporating patches.

	--suresh