At 23:46 15.1.2001 +0100, Henning Brauer wrote:
>On Mon, Jan 15, 2001 at 03:18:10PM -0500, Russell Nelson wrote:
>> I'm considering removing the entire patches section from
>> www.qmail.org.
>>
>> Why? Because a patch implies that something is wrong, and needs to be
>> fixed. However, when someone produces a "patch" for smtp-auth, that
>> implies that qmail-smtpd has a problem that the patch fixes. I'd
>> rather see people steal the necessary parts of Makefile, and Dan's
>> library code, and create a stand-alone "qmail-smtpd-auth" program.
>
>I'd just rename it from patches to "additional functionality" or something
>like that.
>
I guess, thats the correct approach. It would be very helpful for the qmail
community to "organize" the patches - or have them organized. From my point
of view - actually how I organize the mails coming from this mailing list -
one should differentiate between "Add-Ones" (eg. scripts working within
.qmail and the brand new Log-Analyzer in perl) leaving the product
unchanged and "Miscellaneous enhancements" covering the patches against the
code. Both should be organized by feature and/or qmail module.
This would help to keep track of the patches. When I initially created the
SPAMCONTROL patch, I had the same problem like everybody has: Here and
there is a useful piece of code (=patch) which I integrated into a larger
set. But this is not as trivial as it seems.
While qmail 1.03 is since years in the field SMTP development is going
further (eg. STARTTLS and SASL) and of cause, everybody is interesting
employing those features. It is necessary to integrate those enhancements
(even though they are not coming from DJB and might be as complex as
qmail-ldap) in order to be competitve.
In addition, since qmail is prefered by ISPs, there requirements are
different wrt the end user. Therefore, we have today packages like
vpopmail, sqwebmail and others which enhence qmail and it's complexity
significantly. Maybe it would worthwile to consider this as well as an
"organizational" item for qmail.org.
cheers.
eh.
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