Re: [RFR] templates://qmail/{qmail.templates}
On second thoughts I don't know if there's really any point
reviewing control.real - it's essentially just a copy of the
*nineties* uptream blurb, and needs to be completely replaced with
something that compares Qmail with modern MTAs (and RFCs) and
explains its current status in Debian.
Highlights:
> Package: qmail
[...]
> Description: Secure, reliable, efficient, simple mail transport system
(Well, there's nothing seriously wrong with this synopsis.)
> qmail is a secure, reliable, efficient, simple message transfer agent. It
> is meant as a replacement for the entire sendmail-binmail system on typical
> Internet-connected UNIX hosts.
Debian has provided a standard replacement for Sendmail (and various
popular replacements for the replacement!) for a long, long time, so
this is not very suitable for a package description. I had never
even heard of "binmail" - is it antique-UNIX-speak for /bin/mail?
> .
Note that the "Secure:" paragraph is conspicuously missing. It's
hard to read that as anything but an implied (and undeserved)
criticism.
> Reliable: qmail's straight-paper-path philosophy guarantees that a message,
> once accepted into the system, will never be lost. qmail also supports
> maildir, a new, super-reliable user mailbox format. Maildirs, unlike mbox
> files and mh folders, won't be corrupted if the system crashes during
> delivery. Even better, not only can a user safely read his mail over NFS,
> but any number of NFS clients can deliver mail to him at the same time.
"Straight-paper-path" is Greek to me (apparently an analogy from
printers, but one that entirely fails as an explanation), and this
description has no business advertising maildir format as "new".
> .
> Efficient: On a Pentium, qmail can easily sustain 200000 local messages per
> day---that's separate messages injected and delivered to mailboxes in a real
> test! Although remote deliveries are inherently limited by the slowness of
> DNS and SMTP, qmail overlaps 20 simultaneous deliveries by default, so it
> zooms quickly through mailing lists.
Just imagine how fast it could run on a Pentium Pro!
> .
> Simple: qmail is vastly smaller than any other Internet MTA. Some reasons why:
> (1) Other MTAs have separate forwarding, aliasing, and mailing list
> mechanisms. qmail has one simple forwarding mechanism that lets users handle
> their own mailing lists.
> (2) Other MTAs offer a spectrum of delivery modes, from fast+unsafe to
> slow+queued. qmail-send is instantly triggered by new items in the queue, so
> the qmail system has just one delivery mode: fast+queued.
> (3) Other MTAs include, in effect, a specialized version of inetd that
> watches the load average. qmail's design inherently limits the machine load,
> so qmail-smtpd can safely run from your system's inetd.
"Other MTAs" include ssmtp (installed size 8kb), so I strongly
suspect this is just false advertising - especially point 3 (see
"Template: qmail/inetd").
> .
> Replacement for sendmail: qmail supports host and user masquerading, full
> host hiding, virtual domains, null clients, list-owner rewriting, relay
> control, double-bounce recording, arbitrary RFC 822 address lists, cross-host
> mailing list loop detection, per-recipient checkpointing, downed host
> backoffs, independent message retry schedules, etc. In short, it's up to
> speed on modern MTA features. qmail also includes a drop-in ``sendmail''
> wrapper so that it will be used transparently by your current UAs.
"Modern MTA features" as of the nineties; last I heard it was
lagging behind on more recent innovations in authentication etc.
Please can we throw out this whole extended description and start
again?
--
JBR with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package
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