On Sat, 2005-01-15 at 11:59 +0100, Harald Arnesen wrote: > "John Dangler" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > Is anyone here running qmail on gentoo 2.6.10 ? > > I've been trying for the better part of 8 hours to get sendmail to run with > > no luck. The tech at my isp said that qmail would be a lot simpler and > > easier to get up and running. I need to get a mail system running on this > > box! > > Why anyone would want qmail is beyond me. And I'm not the only one with > that view: well, I'm not a programmer, and I certainly can't argue with Linus Travolds about programing issues :) but I can give you these reasons to use qmail from a user's point of view:
1. it's VERY simple to configure. after you get used to the fact
that there is no one very large file with unreadable settings,
you can configure qmail from scratch in less then a minute.
2. it's never been compromised.
on the down side (of qmail) is the fact that it only checks if the
recipient exist after it accepts the email which could lead to a very
large queue (trying to be sent back to bogus senders). to solve this
issue there are number of patches which aren't included in any of the
distributions I use that address this issue. (those who are interested
can take a look at: http://netdevice.com/qmail/rcptck/).
>
> Date: Sat, 5 Jun 2004 23:07:25 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Linus Torvalds <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: Kalin KOZHUHAROV <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Cc: Davide Libenzi <davidel@xmailserver.org>,
> Robert Love <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Chris Wedgwood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
> Arjan van de Ven <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
> Russell Leighton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
> Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
> Subject: Re: clone() <-> getpid() bug in 2.6?
> In-Reply-To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
> qmail is a piece of crap. The source code is completely unreadable, and it
> seems to think that "getpid()" is a good source of random data. Don't ask
> me why.
>
> It literally does things like
>
> random = now() + (getpid() << 16);
>
> and since there isn't a single comment in the whole source tree, it's
> pointless to wonder why. (In case you wonder, "now()" just does a
> "time(NULL)" call - whee.).
>
> I don't understand why people bother with it. It's not like Dan Bernstein
> is so charming that it makes up for the deficiencies of his programs.
>
> But no, even despite the strange usage, this isn't a performance issue.
> qmail will call "getpid()" a few tens of times per connection because of
> the wonderful quality of randomness it provides, or something.
>
> This is another gem you find when grepping for "getpid()" in qmail, and
> apparently the source of most of them:
>
> if (now() - when < ((60 + (getpid() & 31)) << 6))
>
> Don't you love it how timeouts etc seem to be based on random values that
> are calculated off the lower 5 bits of the process ID? And don't you find
> the above (totally uncommented) line just a thing of beauty and clarity?
>
> Yeah.
>
> Anyway, you did find something that used more than a handful of getpid()
> calls, but no, it doesn't qualify as performance-critical, and even
> despite it's peyote-induced (or hey, some people are just crazy on their
> own) getpid() usage, it's not a reason to have a buggy glibc.
>
> Linus
Bye
--
Haim
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