Re: Qmail

[Raul Miller <rdm@rdm.legislate.com>]

Mark Shuttleworth:
>   1. is qmail as secure as they say?

Depends on what they were saying, but most likely yes.

>   2. is there a debianised version of 1.01?

No.

>   3. if not,  and I have to build one,  is there a document
>      describing debians mailsystem assumptions?

There's several tricks to building a qmail distribution.  Best way to
get qmail installed without a distribution is install some other
mailer, put it on hold, and optionally delete its files, then install
from source using the instructions that come with qmail.

If you're going to build a distribution, be aware that 1.01 isn't
redistributable yet, and 1.00 had a rather odd distribution policy
(see ftp://koobera.math.uic.edu/www/qmaildist.html). 

Basically, you'd have several choices:

(1) make a package which depended on gcc and make, and which included
the raw, unadulterated source tar.gz file.  You then get to manage the
conf* files as configuration files (somehow not stepping on them when
untaring, but guaranteeing they exist), and you get to run through
compiling and installing the binaries and man pages.

(2) make a .deb package to your taste and get Dan Bernstein to approve
of its distribution.

(3) get Dan to do the .deb packaging himself.

Some combination of (2) and (3) might be most interesting.  (1) is the
path of least resistance.

Because of the "non-distribution of changes" part of the distribution
policy (supposedly, this makes qmail more secure), qmail might not
ever be part of the main debian distribution...  I dunno about that.

-- 
Raul


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