Greg Folkert wrote:
If you do a bit of reading, you'll see that the multi-config files setup is very flexible.
It might be flexible, but it's utterly hard to get and to maintain an overview of what is actually being configured. I didn't manage to find that out, and getting to the configuration you want becomes impossible.
It's not only the splitting of the configuration across a multitude of files, but using macros and/or replacements within the actual configuration file created thereof makes it totally unreadable.
Exim becomes like sendmail with this :( It's a very big mistake to do it that way in the first place.
It has made it so I can use Exim4 with C-Panel and Plesk, rather than <shudder> the default. Yes, I have a heavily invested time into it... but it works and I don't care.
What are c-panel and plesk?I have also invested a lot of time into configuring mail servers. Many years ago I kicked sendmail because it's not configurable and switched to qmail on Suse distributions. When switching to Debian, Exim was proposed as the default MTA, and I decided to give it a try. I found out that Exim is just great because it's easy to configure and has lots of nice features. But later, a switch from Exim3 to Exim4 was made (which was overdue), and Debain-Exim4 started out with the automagic configuration. I had more than enough trouble to get the simplest setup with that on my system at home, and I still don't have the functionality I had before yet because I gave up on the sucking autoconfig and haven't had time to get it anew yet. Recently, I had to renew our company mail server, and it was obvious that I wont be able to set things up with the autoconfig. So I just started with the example config provided along the docs, and it became very easy to get to the required setup within a few minutes. All I had to learn about is new features like ACLs and other small changes to the config options. There's no way to get that with the autoconfig, and anything you get out of it is an unreadable config file that _might_ do what it should, but you won't know because you can't read it. So I keep saying the autoconfig sucks.
Fortunately, you don't have to use it if you don't want to, and if it's helpful for others, than it is a good thing.
Just think how nice it would be to be able to drop a template file into a directory for a domain (virtual) and then allow the owner to have control over it through a svn merge. So that it can be reverted. It'd be hell to do that with the single config.
Hm, I have never dealt with virtual domains, so I can't think about it. I just keep hoping that we won't get forced to use the autoconfig at some time.
And I can only recommend not to use it because it makes things much more difficult once you want more than the standard options you are provided with when setting up a system. But if you don't want more than that, you won't ask here :)
GH