Re: qmail.org DEAD?

On Tue, Jul 2, 2019, at 11:35 AM, Amitai Schleier wrote:
> Folks who have been part of open source projects, does this sound like 
> it could work? What would you change, add, remove, or otherwise suggest?

Hi, Amitai!

That list looks great!

One addition to the list that I would suggest is to come up with a new name for the project.  I'm not thrilled to suggest this, but I think that when the group of people put together netqmail, it was a help that they gave it a name and called it something other than qmail.  (I also found it nice that they included "qmail" in the name to help clearly communicate what it is.)  Once they did that, everyone could refer to it by name and know exactly what that meant (i.e., qmail + the listed patches).

Another addition to the list that I would suggest is to make it easy to configure (the build), build, and install.  Doing all that by hand is a pain right now.  You've done an excellent job of automating all of that with the pkgsrc qmail-run package, but obviously that requires using pkgsrc, and I worry that that is a big enough barrier to entry for some people that they won't consider it.

Even though I'm not a big fan of Autotools, being able to do "./configure && make && make install" is pretty convenient, and a lot of package management systems support it.  If not actually Autotools, it could be an Autotools workalike.  Or something else, even though not as standard as the Autotools interface, assuming it requires running just a few commands, would really be a big improvement.

This would also increase the chance of the software being included in other OS package repositories (e.g., Homebrew, RHEL, Ubuntu, Arch, Gentoo, Alpine, etc.) which would also be a big plus.  It's certainly convenient for someone intending a production deployment, but it's also convenient for someone wishing to try it out.

It's also convenient for someone writing a tutorial.  There are a number of tutorials on the Internet on how to install and configure software X on operating system Y.  For example, DigitalOcean seems to host a number of these (not surprisingly since I assume they hope people will use their services for hosting), and a Google search (e.g., "how install postfix rhel") will often find them.  When a tutorial author can write, e.g., "First, install Postfix: # yum install postfix", that's really easy compared to what they'd have to write without a binary package being available in the OS's package repository.

> Folks who wish there were sufficiently authoritative updates to qmail: 
> does this sound like a development process you might be able to trust 
> and that might produce updates you'd want to track?

Yes!

Regards,

Lewis