Re: Bug#510415: tech-ctte: Qmail inclusion (or not) in Debian

[Tollef Fog Heen <tfheen@err.no>]

]] Russ Allbery 

| One of the problems with Mailman for large installations like ours (over
| 20,000 mailing lists, many archived, many with very large messages with
| attachments, some with huge numbers of subscribers) is that it's hard to
| cluster multiple systems in Mailman.  Too much of the data assumes a
| single writer, particularly for archiving.  So you can't easily
| horizontally scale by just throwing more systems at the problem.

Mailman intentionally ships with a quite simplistic archiver; you're
meant to plug in your own if you need another one.  Most mailing list
archival software can work by just being a subscriber to the list, which
is easy to scale across machines.  This said, the lack of clustering
features is something that ought to be addressed at some point.

| The large message with attachments problem is particularly bad and one
| that Debian doesn't really have in the same way.  We have users who send
| multiple MB Word attachments to mailing lists with a thousand subscribers,
| most of whom are all at the same recipient MX servers.  Duplicating those
| messages per subscriber is significant.

I'm fairly sure your setup is not a representative one, but handling big
installations is one of the goals too.

| All that being said, I don't consider this single issue sufficiently
| severe to argue against including qmail in the archive.  I find it very
| annoying, but it falls short of being actively broken IMO.  A few more
| qmail sites in the world realistically isn't going to make that big of a
| difference to the problem of unparseable bounces, and qmail is *far* from
| the only offender.

Very much agreed on those points.

-- 
Tollef Fog Heen
UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are