Re: To be a new DFly commiter

[Michel Talon <talon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Matthew Dillon wrote:


> 
>     I personally believe that postfix is superior.  I personally do not
>     mind running GPL'd code.  But I also would prefer to have as little
>     GPL'd code in our managed code base as possible.
> 
>     What does this mean?  I would dearly like to integrate portions of
>     pkgsrc managed packages into our buildworld and installworld
>     system, that is have the buildworld create a little package building
>     jail and build and install selected packages, with appropriate
>     defaults,
>     as part of the base system build.  Then we would not have to import or
>     maintain the sources for at least the larger integrated pieces (such
>     as sendmail/postfix, bind, etc).

If i can allow myself to comment Matt's opinion, i think that the two
statements above are true and excellent. More generally, there are pieces
of traditional BSD installations, such as sendmail, etc. which have better
non BSD variants, so that an integrated mechanism to get rid of such base
system tools ( i mean only selected few ones ) and import external
packages. 


> 
> b) Add imap-uw as simple pop3 and imap4 daemon.
> 
>     I'd prefer this be maintained via pkgsrc.

Yes, in particular when imap-uw is a notorious buggy, insecure 
and bad performing application.


> 
>     I don't think a single person would be able to maintain an
>     alternative.  Simply keeping up to date with all the new versions
>     of various things that occur every day would be difficult.

Another excellent statement! Maintaining a decent ports system is a task for
hundred people. FreeBSD has aroud 200 people doing that, Debian, around
1000. One has to be totally unaware of realities to suggest tools from
obscure Linux distributions, wether they are good or bad, when such
distribution may collapse at any moment. Already the move  to NetBSD pkgsrc
has cost DFLY division by 3 of the number of available ports with respect
to FreeBSD for an advantage that i have hard time to even discern. The
NetBSD people have replaced the horrible mess which is the 4000 lines 
bsd.port.mk by a similar horrible mess except it is scattered over many
5 lines files. Like in many cases it is OpenBSD which is doing the good
work, and in particular they have understood the obvious, that is a ports
system must be centered about binary packages, not recompiling source. 
This is true for at least two reasons:
- first, today users don't want to lose time compiling
- second, it is *impossible* to guarantee reliability of a system based on
source code, because two people may compile the same software on different
background, and obtain different result. This is a fundamental issue that
nobody will be able to solve.