On Wed, Dec 30, 1998 at 03:31:00PM -0500, Dave Sill wrote:
> Let me try again. Licensing alone could conceivably explain why Red
> Hat doesn't ship qmail. But it does't explain why they don't ship
> exim, smail, zmailer, or any other OSS sendmail equivalent.
Let's suppose that aside from licensing that qmail is the only MTA
that provides enough of a convincing improvement to consider knocking
sendmail out of a distribution. It's more cleanly designed then exim,
more secure then smail, more stable then zmailer, and faster then the
others (by far in my experience). That could be why none of the
others ship.
> >This is absurd. Would Eric Allman's reputation be "on the line" if Red
> >Hat broke their sendmail package?
>
> Trick question, right? Should I answer "No. Eric already trashed his
> own reputation with sendmail" or "Yes. Whatever little reputation he's
> regained by the recent sendmail bug drought would vanish"?
*cough*
He's got a great reputation in the press and at the executive
level. He's the name that's associated with sendmail, sendmail is
publicised as running "75% of the mail on the internet" right? I
think his code and mailer is shoddy, but his reputation in the wider
world seems to be completely unconnected with the security, speed, or
reliability* of the software he's written.
A lot of people use and like sendmail. Probably a lot more then the
number of people who've deployed qmail.
[...]
> >The notion that any individual author would get the flack for a broken
> >distribution is rather silly.
>
> Silly things happen all the time.
See above re: sendmail and allman.
> >Who told djb that he'll have to support third party changes? Nobody told
> >him that.
>
> Of course not. But victims of these third party changes will surely go
> to him or his lists for help. And these victims will also be unaware
> of the changes their vendor made, so the help they get might be
> wrong.
True. Is that so bad? The list and djb get a lot of mail already.
New users have questions that need to be answered no matter what their
method of installation. All a standard, even broken distribution
really changes is that the question becomes a FAQ almost immideatly,
and can be answered simply and thoroughly.
> There will be unnecessary confusion in the support community,
> and this confusion will reflect poorly on Dan and his products to
> casual observers who don't realize that the confusion is due to third
> party diddling.
I think you're overstating the problem. If you have a repeatable
problem because of a single change that is installed everywhere it
becomes almost a non-issue. Just a nuisance, not a real problem.
> >Does this mean that James Brister is responsible for supporting all of
> >the stuff that Red Hat puts into inn-1.7.2 RPM?
>
> Nobody's holding a gun to head and making him answer them, but, yes,
> Brister has to deal with whatever gunk is in the RPM because he's
> going to get questions about it. Dan seeks not to burden himself with
> whatever frivilous changes the vendor wants to make to qmail.
Why all of the negativity? I think a package author would be happy
that he stops getting FAQ's in his mailbox because a lot of nifty
things are included in the package that users always ask him and/or
inn mailing lists for, and that cuts down on the traffic. Maybe it
evens out or tips the balance towards the package reducing irrelevant
traffic.
> Huh? How about improved performance, efficiency, security, and
> functionality? Or did those evaporate because Dan won't let Red Hat
> diddle the code?
It hasn't improved over itself much since 1.00, so the reasons
probably haven't changed since their last evaluation, which was
negative.
-Peter
