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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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