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

["Binand Raj S." <binand@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Sandip Bhattacharya forced the electrons to say:
> AFAIK, DJB doesn't prevent you from distributing qmail per se. He
> disallows distributions of *modified* versions of Qmail. Patches to
> the original qmail distrib are available in plenty.

What use is the patch if one cannot use/distribute it? I personally don't
think DJB's qmail distribution license is either a GPL compatible one
(www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html) or would meet the expectations
of the Debian Free Software Guidelines (www.debian.org/social_contract).

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

Hmm... debatable. What I gather prompted DJB to write qmail was the
observation that sendmail is too buggy and difficult to configure. But
sendmail has improved so much in the intervening years; it is now a
robust piece of software, without a major bug for quite sometime (the
last bug, IIRC, was not in sendmail but in the Linux kernel - and that
too about a year ago). Sendmail normally works out of the box for most
users, and for service providers, the usual modification required are a
few lines in sendmail.cw or mailertable or whatever. I hear configuring
8.11.2 is a breeze - and every file is stored in one place, /etc/mail.

>  3. You have the freedom to modify the source to your own liking.
>  4. You have the freedom to distribute the original package as much as
>      you like.

But DJB doesn't combine the above two freedoms. Or, that is what I
figured from his page (cr.yp.to/qmail.html)

> Sounds good enough for me. What more freedom do you want ? The only
> cribber seems to me are folks like Redhat, SUSE are other distributors
> who like distributing packages with their own modifications. 

This is getting too much into Arun's territory, but I'd say this: the
essence of software freedom is that one is able to modify the sources
and distribute it, so long as one publishes the changes as well. The
distributions you mentioned do adhere to this point, and they are not
allowed to do that in qmail's case. Why would they ship qmail if they
are not allowed to package it and distribute it with the modifications
that their customers want?

> And I suppose when a "RedHatter" (like me ;) has a chance to
> 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 ... 

FWIW, there is an initiative called FHS (Filesystem Heirarchy Standard -
www.pathname.com/fhs) that strives to standardize the Unix filesystem
heirarchy. Major Linux distributors are already part of this initiative,
and try to be compliant. 

If you ask me, the difference between distributions lie mainly in one
of four areas:

a) The installation procedure
b) The package management system
c) The system initialisation scripts layout.
d) The distribution specific tools that are used to configure the system

Distributions are trying to make (a) as painless as possible. For (b)
there are two predominant options - RPM and .deb, and if Connectiva's
recent efforts to combine the two succeeds, this will also go off. (c)
is also one of 2 options. (d) is something one has to learn to live with
- or really be proficient in hand editing your config files (wanna try
it with XF86Config?).

If linuxconf and its modules were somewhat usable, I feel even (d)
would have not been in this list. Maybe comanche etc. is a move in the
right direction?

> 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 !!!

I haven't used qmail ever, but I hear it does a lot of things. Sendmail
does one thing - that of transporting mails to the recipient. Once upon a
time, I was taught that the philosophy of Unix is that a program should
do one thing, and do that one thing reliably. In this respect I feel
sendmail does what is expected of it admirably. It doesn't even try to
deliver mails - it calls a specialised program designed for mail delivery
(procmail) to do that.

How big is qmail? I can give you figures for sendmail (sizes as reported
by rpm):

sendmail      477388
sendmail-cf   515839
sendmail-doc 1393365

The main executable is approx. 320k. Seems pretty small to me.

Binand