Re: eQmail or s/qmail

* Erwin Hoffmann <[email protected]> [2016-05-15 11:13]:
> Still there is a substantial user base out there

yes.

Let's face it: new qmail installs are a rare exception.

> b) MY personal contribution was to include a rock-solid IPv6 implementation working for both 
> Linux and BSD (at least) because these two stacks are different. Further, I took the chance to 
> jump on the train for TLS encryption and provide some High-Level APIs together with UCSPI-

the network APIs are all well defined and not OS specific at all.

writing portable code isn't the black magic you make it sound.

once you stop relying on the idiotic "embedded v4"-adressing, there is
little (should be nothing, really. well. should.) to care about.

TLS is a nightmare.
openssl has APIs designed to drive the consumers insane (they provoke
bad bugs)
gnutls is a bad joke
libressl's libtls API is much better, but very young and probably not
widepread enough yet

> c) Integration into different OS is still a battle. At least we need to consider *BSD, Debian, 
> perhaps Ubuntu and the Rad Hat based (rpm) systems like SuSE (in Germany).

no. POSIX. period.

and things like file system locations are up to the packagers anyway.

> I made the attempt to use DJB's slashpacket convention; but not everyone welcomes this.

well, the world at large is better off without "I need to reinvent the
wheel again" slapshpackage alike attempts.

> e) qmail-remote is CPU bound for outgoing TLS connections

you better profile.
hint: it isn't. not even close.

to be honest, I consider that wasted effort. the world moved on. qmail
was extremely important at its time, but isn't worth the effort since
it is a) way too different which makes it way too hard to audit and b)
its architecture was sane in '98 - but plain doesn't cut it 15 years
later. This is fundamental and basically unfixable without turning
qmail upside down.

qmail's place is largely in the history books now. qmail brought the
concept of privilege seperation - even if it wasn't labeled so - to
us. Not just MTAs, qmail was one of the first visible bits ever, with
great influence to everything after. Again, not just MTAs.

Today, who's still using qmail? Two groups, imho:
1) large deployments effectively using their own fork
2) a couple of freaks that can't let go :)

the first group doesn't need a nicely packaged MTA; they have forked
anyway.

the second will probably never agree on direction.

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