Bug#740070: Updating the sendmail Maintainer field
Debian's Sendmail package has been orphaned for several years. The
amount of work which might be involved in maintainership is a little
scary, but I should like to take it on.
To control unwanted mail, I primarily use milters. In the early years
(I've used Sendmail in production for more than 25 years) I tried many
milters, but after a decade or so I settled on about seven, which did
most of what I wanted - but with varying degrees of pain, because of
differences in design, configuration syntax etc. Finally I wrote my
own milter (in Perl), which replaced all the rest, and which I've now
been using for about four years. I won't bore you with the details of
the milter's capabilities unless you're interested in them, but it is
now nearing the point where I could let someone else see it. :)
For those who would like to use milters but who have perhaps found the
Sendmail Milter API daunting, I hope that my milter will make things
easier. Coding a milter in Perl is much easier, and much safer, and
very much quicker and more productive than is coding a milter in C.
Hopefully one day my milter might be incorporated into a teaching aid.
My Perl milter uses a CPAN module, Sendmail::PMilter, which provides
the Perl interface to Sendmail's Milter API. Sendmail::PMilter is in
the development stages, but I have been using the latest development
version for a year. A couple of years ago I took on maintainership of
Sendmail::PMilter myself, initially so that I could remove dependence
on another CPAN module, Sendmail::Milter. That module is in a very
unsatisfactory state, having been unmaintained for well over 15 years.
For more than a year I tried to take on the CPAN maintainership of the
Sendmail::Milter module too, but it seemed that the present maintainer
was being deliberately obstructive and I abandoned that effort. The
Sendmail::PMilter development version no longer uses Sendmail::Milter,
and I think I've fixed all the outstanding Sendmail::PMilter issues,
although it could all use a lot more testing (especially the threaded
interface, which I have not used at all - it blew up spectacularly at
my first attempt, and although I've patched it according to others who
have used it, I've never been back there).
Eventually I should like Sendmail, Sendmail::PMilter and my own milter
all to install and work together seamlessly on a Debian installation.
Although I'm comfortable with C, Perl and building software generally,
on the subject of Debian packaging I am a novice and the documentation
that I have found about using the bug tracking system seems to me to
be inadequate. Andreas has offered to help me get up to speed with
the Debian specifics, and this gives me much more confidence of being
able to handle the maintainership. I should not expect that Andreas
would need to do very much more than answer occasional emails from me
in the early stages of my involvement; thereafter he can expect to be
able to take a seat at the back if he so wishes.
There are offers of help from several others in this thread (740070)
too. Anyone who'd like to chip in will be very welcome, even if it's
just installing the odd .deb now and again for testing; I'll be more
than happy to act as a concentration/triage point.
73,
Ged.
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