Re: Bug#457318: ITP: qmail -- a secure, reliable, efficient, simple message transfer agent

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Stephen Gran <sgran@debian.org> writes:

> No, actually the question is whether it's worth Debian's time to maintain
> it, distribute it, and support it.  qmail is one of the few pieces
> of software I've ever seen that is so poorly written that it's author
> recommends running it under a supervisor because it can't stay running
> on it's own.

I'm not a fan of qmail either, but but this just isn't true.  djb
advocates running *everything* under a supervisor process to eliminate
what he sees as one possible type of failure, not because of any specific
problems with qmail.  I've run qmail for years and I've never seen the
supervisor process have to do anything.  It runs as reliably as a daemon
as any other MTA.

I'm switching away from it everywhere for other reasons, most notably its
horrible behavior with spam reflection, but stability is *not* a problem
for qmail.

> It also doesn't support most useful features any reasonable MTA can be
> expected to support without fairly extensive patching.

This is generally true.

> So, right, the argument we're left with is, it's quick and it doesn't
> have many apparent security flaws.

And it's not particularly quick.  It used to be, but qmail development has
been stalled for years, and since then other MTA systems such as Postfix
have caught up.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>