Re:Notqmail: Collaborative open-source successor to qmail
by pjc50 on Monday July 29, 2019 @09:27AM
(#20554348)
The release philosophy conflict is interesting. Very rarely do we see "finished" software, but the current "official release" version of qmail was released on June, 15, 1998. This is basically due to DJB's insistence on avoiding bugs by taking the UNIX philosophy as far as possible; everything is done by a small set of processes communicating over pipes, and the attack surface kept very small.
The downside is its limited integration with other systems and especially databases. If you want to configure qmail, it has to be through text files. But if you want to operate one of the common cases of a relay-only host or a single UNIX host delivering mail to its local users, it works very well.
Re:Notqmail: Collaborative open-source successor to qmail
by schmonz on Monday July 29, 2019 @02:35PM
(#20557807)
Extensibility is [an explicit goal](https://github.com/notqmail/notqmail/wiki#goals), for reasons such as these. If we introduce some more small interfaces -- 1998 qmail was already ripe with examples -- we'll make it easy for anyone to program extensions. If we make it easy for folks to program extensions, we may find there lots of common extensions available. That's the hope, anyway :-)
A good description of their goals can be found on the wiki:
* https://github.com/notqmail/notqmail/wiki
> [Notqmail] will provide stable, compatible, small releases that do not conflict with or break your local site customization or the other software you run in your mail system. notqmail also aims higher: we are developing a qmail-derived system that is extensible, easily packaged, and increasingly applicable to a wide variety of modern needs
An idea of upcoming changes can be found on the roadmap:
* https://github.com/notqmail/notqmail/wiki/Release-Roadmap
There's also an interesting discussion of Notqmail, with responses from many of the team, on Lobste.rs:
* https://lobste.rs/s/2r3stk/notqmail_collaborative_open_sourc...