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

[Suresh Ramasubramanian <mallet@xxxxxxx>]

Binand Raj S. [Fri, Feb 02, 2001 at 02:15:57AM +0530]: 

> 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


Opinions are something DJB never runs short of, and sticks to against all odds :)

> 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.
 
Well ... I'll just say "it's much easier than configuring 8.8.8 and older versions) :)

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

> > 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 !!!
 
QMail = A set of several tools (queue processing, local delivery, MTA, etc etc
etc).  Sendmail = Sendmail, period.  Just an MTA.  Of course, it is shipped
with several other things (makemap, libmilter, libsmdb, libsmutil, praliases,
rmail, vacation etc) but they are not part of sendmail, per se.

> deliver mails - it calls a specialised program designed for mail delivery
> (procmail) to do that.
 
That, or mail.local (LMTP) on other OS's - linuxen prefer procmail as the LDA (local
delivery agent) though.

> 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.
 
Let's see (from a compiled, stripped 8.11.2 here)

blackehlo$ du -k /usr/sbin/sendmail
388	/usr/sbin/sendmail

blackehlo$ du -k /etc/mail
148	/etc/mail

blackehlo$ du -k /usr/src/sendmail-8.11.2/doc
732	/usr/src/sendmail-8.11.2/doc/op
736	/usr/src/sendmail-8.11.2/doc

However, size doesn't matter.  Exim is substantially larger in size (esp when
perl support is compiled into it) but it doesnt take up all that much memory.  

Postfix is similar to qmail in architecture (not monolithic like sendmail) -
but it is (imho) streets ahead of qmail in performance (and doesn't try to hog
all the available connections on a server like qmail does)

	--suresh