Thoughts on exim4-conifg

[moseley@hank.org]

What do people think of exim4-config?  It splits the exim config file 
into parts and when exim4 is (re)started a new config file is built from 
all the parts, tested that it's valid and then exim4 is started with the 
new config.  

The file that is written is stripped of comments.  I guess that's good
as it's a smaller config file for exim to process, but then it's missing
comments.  But the generated file (/var/lib/exim4/config.autogenerated) 
is not for human consumption.

The exim4 package does not require one to use this system -- you can  
create /etc/exim4/exim4.conf and bypass exim4-config setup.

At first this new system seemed really great.  For example, to support
mailmain I created three files:

  conf.d/main/01_local_mailman_macros
  conf.d/router/350_local_listdirector
  conf.d/transport/30_local_mailmain

Which seems somewhat cool in that maybe in the future when you install 
mailman those files are automatically added when the mailman package is 
installed.

But as I was working with setting up exim I found myself running:

  update-exim4.conf --output test.conf

then running exim4 -S test.conf, editing test.conf, and repeating.  I
just found it easier to edit one file, write it and run exim4 -C while  
testing than working with the update-exim4.conf for each change.

But then it was somewhat of a pain to remember to copy my changes to 
test.conf to each individual file in the conf.d directory.

I also spent a lot of time editing the conf.d/acl files.  There I found 
it harder to add separate files for a specific ACL test and had to edit 
existing files (e.g. 30_exim4-config_check_rcpt), which makes me worry 
that someday on an dist-upgrade I'll overwrite my additions/changes.

Perhaps I'm not understanding the design goals behind exim4-config.
Anyone else have comments about exim4-config?

One other issues with exim4-config is that it conflicts with exim: it 
provides etc/email-addresses (so does exim).  Maybe I'm understanding 
things wrong, but if you want to upgrade to exim4 you can't download 
exim4-config and set up the config while exim3 is still running.

I will note that the upgrade from exim3 to exim4 when easier than I 
expected.  The Exim4 maintainer Andreas Metzler has done a fantastic job 
with packaging exim4  and was very helpful and responsive to my 
questions.


-- 
Bill Moseley
moseley@hank.org