On Tue, Oct 28, 2025 at 04:10:27PM +0000, Jeremy Harris via Exim-users wrote:
The name "exim4" is a Debian thing.
The Exim project moved on from Exim version 3 in 2004. We are over twenty years
up the line from there.
So is Debian. We stopped shipping exim 3 in 2007.
The only thing we didn't do yet is renaming the package back to exim.
That's a major, error prone effort (especially if we did it the complete
way and moving /etc/exim4, /var/log/exim4, /var/lib/exim4 etc to their
respective s/4// values). Debian prides itself to support upgrades and
to make those updates as painless as possible, and doing this gratuitous
rename WILL cause trouble. Thus, we generally try to avoid these things.
We still ship apache as apache2, for example). And the apache 1 =>
apache 2 migration way way easier than going from exim 3 to exim4, exim4
is totally incompatible to exim 3 both configuration and concept-wise.
This would actually not be that big an issue if exim upstream would
stop complaining about that. I guess that by far the largest number of
exim's installation base comes from our exim4 packages, so accepting
that will probably help novice users to be less confused.
I acknowledge this is less than ideal but given that the MTA war was won
ten years ago by postfix, I think that Debian is unlikely to go through
those motions of renaming.
Greetings
Marc
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