On Monday, April 8, 2024 12:48:13 PM EDT Marc Haber wrote: > > > "we replace exim with postfix as the default MTA", > > > > Ahhhh, this question always makes me wonder: If our default MTA is exim > > why do I have such a hard time to find documents about exim in wiki.d.o > > while there is always a postfix solution. I personally usually go with > > the default and thus using exim. But well, if it comes to tricky > > details I always need to fall back to the longish exim docs while the > > short solution is available for postfix in wiki.d.o. > > That's the next chapter in the great MTA war which has been won by > postfix. As somebody who has been working on Exim in the 2000 years (I > am still on the team but haven't done anything useful to the package > for 15 years), I of course must say that Exim is the better MTA; but it > is way harder to use. > > I tend to use the metaphor that Postfix is the menu of a nice restaurant > run by professionals, offering much that you might want to eat, while > Exim is the fully equipped kitchen with a storage full of the best > ingredients, but you need to cook yourself. Summarized, if you find > something on the restaurant's menu that feels your need, order that > dish from the Postfix menu, and if not, go to the kitchen and cook your > own Exim menu. > > And of cours, Postfix's architecture is more modern while Exim still is > a monolithic, suid root blob, and Postfix also is more suitable for > sending out bulk mail since it is way better parallelized tham Exim is > (exim's disadvantage in this regard doesn't show as blatantly on a very > busy system with a full queue). For the record (as the only active maintainer of postfix), I am super happy that postfix is NOT the default MTA. There are enough bug reports as it is. One additional point that I have not seen mentioned is the cognitive load associated with team maintenance. Almost all the packages are team maintained and that's great for things where we have general consensus on how to go about things (like Python packages, where most of my work is), but having multiple maintainers also then requires coordination and resolution of disagreements. For postfix, I prefer that I don't really have to deal with that. If something's broken (in a violates policy, breaks things for the user kind of way), I don't mind NMUs if I'm not paying attention (that does happen sometimes), but the original maintainer of postfix (lamont) made some opinionated choices about the package that I think it's not practical to undo now and I am glad I don't have to argue with people about that (much). Scott K
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