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The sad tale of qmailThe sad tale of qmailPosted Aug 24, 2006 4:55 UTC (Thu) by felixfix (subscriber, #242)Parent article: A comparison of Mail Transfer Agents - Part One
It had so much promise, but that damned license has hobbled it. I was very happy with it when I switched so many years ago, but it has stagnated and is a mess. One of its problems is the mailing list, full of smug arrogant people whose politest answers are the absolute bare minimum of words to tell which cryptic piece of documentation was not fully read and digested, missing the point that the person asking wants advice, not the barest man pages in existence. They are complete, but only as a reference, with almost no guidance as to why you might want to do something.
I sometimes think qmail's greatest benefit is showing how wonderful the GPL is.
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The sad tale of qmail Posted Aug 24, 2006 5:02 UTC (Thu) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] I agree. qmail revolutionised the world of MTAs and for that we should thank DJB. Today it is a pain: it doesn't even compile without patches.
The sad tale of qmail Posted Aug 31, 2006 16:46 UTC (Thu) by RussNelson (guest, #27730) [Link] Only because glibc isn't backwards compatible. Let's point the finger at the party that deserves the blame.
The sad tale of qmail Posted Aug 24, 2006 16:01 UTC (Thu) by dwheeler (guest, #1216) [Link] You need to add "license" to the criteria, and qmail shows why. It's a source-viewable, but NOT an open source license.Here's one view: http://www.lifewithqmail.org/lwq.html#license
And the problems it causes:
I've read some claims that OSI approved this as an OSS license,
The sad tale of qmail Posted Aug 24, 2006 17:42 UTC (Thu) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link] I think you can distribute precompiled binaries as long as they are strictly from the original unpatched sources, which became worthless when the first patch was issued.
The sad tale of qmail Posted Aug 24, 2006 23:42 UTC (Thu) by cventers (subscriber, #31465) [Link] I'm still sticking to my qmail guns out of reliability and familiarityreasons, but there are two main points of anguish:
1. The licensing issue you describe. It may be free beer and source
2. The source code itself is ugly. Amazingly ugly. Qmail is a *fine*
The sad tale of qmail Posted Aug 31, 2006 16:53 UTC (Thu) by RussNelson (guest, #27730) [Link] Actually, I've gotten quite used to djbc. His library is more sublime than the standard C library. For example, stdC's strchr returns a pointer to the character or a null pointer. This leads to crappy coding like this:*strchr(ptr,';') = '\0'; /* this string always has a semicolon; */ whereas djbc's str_chr returns an offset from the beginning of the array ALWAYS. If the character has not been found, the offset is to the null character. So this is guaranteed to always work: ptr[str_chr(ptr,';')] = '\0';
His functions for dynamic string lengths are so easy to use that I've come to hate coding in stdC without them. They eliminate the half of all security problems caused by buffer overruns.
The sad tale of qmail
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