Subject: Re: The Choices Are Exim, Exim and, er, Exim...
From: "Sabahattin Gucukoglu" <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 27 Apr 2004 12:13:23 +0100

Hi Gerrit/all,

On 26 Apr 2004 at 20:32, Gerrit P. Haase <[email-masked]> spoke, thus:

> 25. April 2004 at 15:17 you wrote:
> 
> [About Exim]
> 
> > Any ideas, recommendations, advice, suggestions, websites, news?  Much
> > appreciated!
> 
> Postfix and Sendmail are not easy if not impossible to build, Qmail
> uses fifos which aren't implemented, there are workarounds, but there
> were also license issues with Qmail, Exim was the first MTA which
> could be compiled with only minor adjustments and so it was the first
> and yet only MTA included in the distribution.

Ah, well, that about wraps it all up, don't it? :-)

I'm not a Posix/UNIX expert, I honestly thought the worst I have to do was 
convert a few Berkeley socket calls into Windows (well, no - of course not 
- but nothing so unequivocally drastic as nearly rewrite the whole darn 
thing), but I see you've already done half of this in Posix emulation of 
Cygwin.  I can't say I'm surprised that Exim is the only one that works - 
I know if I ever get to write my MTA I will not allow it under any 
circumstances to be so platform-dependent.  If that means doing an Apache 
on everyone and having platform-specific sockets code, then so be it.  I 
don't want email delivery to remain a *NIX phenomena - it is at present, 
even if MTAs exist for other platforms, their extensibility and power 
frequently isn't half of what UNIX-Style MTAs tend to offer.  Besides, 
most MTAs descend still from ways of the past, and I want to change that.

Meantime, since my favourite MTAs won't run on Cygwin, I'll keep an eye on 
it for progress and use it as a much-needed Posix environment when it next 
becomes possible (to whoever suggested - no, I can't help you, this is a 
graphical application and I can't manipulate resources) - I am looking 
into trying to make a Cygwin installation into a Bourne environment for 
the MinGW toolchain.  Msys can already be installed but it seems to be 
MinGW-only target; I want to use GCC's switches to select between Cygwin 
and MinGW as machine types so that I can experiment with what works on 
what.  I think this boils down to a slight hierarchical change; I'll try 
and find this out because I need to do a similar thing for my Mipsel cross-
compilations on Linux and don't really want to do things the slack way 
(i.e. redefine the environment and keep the tools in their own tree).

For those it may interest, another, much lower level solution to the 
problem can be had at http://www.colinux.org/ (Cooperative Linux) - that 
idea of actually running the Linux kernel in Windows NT.  On the face of 
it this seems to be a good idea, doing away with even the trickiest of 
platform discrepancies, until you realise that there is once again no link 
between your Windows machine's filesystem(s) and that of your virtualised 
Linux box, to the point, in honesty, where a machine whose purpose in life 
is to runn Linux networking services may as well do so on Linux alone.  
That's why Cygwin is so nice - it lets you use it without actually having 
to sacrifice the oS' own existing tools - text editors, file management, 
scripting languages, etc, etc, etc.

I'll take this moment to thank everyone who has contributed feedback - 
I've been a bit busy to reply to each individually, and I know what I'm 
doing here is a crime.  But, again - cheers for all your combined 
comments; they have been impartial and useful, even if I didn't reach the 
intended goal.  For communities who take the "Fix it yourself if you're so 
worried..." approach - I do understand, the one thing open source *does 
not* do well is cater for unusual or niche requirements, IMHO.  OSS moves 
by imperative rather than principle in the vast majority of cases - you 
can see this everywhere you look: Wine or MinGW has no API documentation, 
Linux 2.6 does not support PCI-To-PCMCIA bridges from Cirrus, GNOME's 
Accessibility was sponsored by Sun, FreeBSD has no VCSA/Braille support 
because no-one really needs it.  Niches like this tend to get themselves a 
bit stuck.  Accessibility is just one of them things some people are 
either unable or unwilling to make a priority without good reason, and no-
one is really to blame on that account.

Cheers,
Sabahattin
-- 
Thought for the day:
    Book (n): a utensil used to pass time while waiting
    for the TV repairman.

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