Re: Exim

[Jason Tishler <jason at tishler dot net>]

Pierre,

On Thu, Aug 22, 2002 at 07:30:05PM -0400, Pierre A. Humblet wrote:
> I'd like to propose including exim, a Mail Transfer Agent
> similar to sendmail, in setup.

My vote is a *very* emphatic YES!  I was going to contact you either to
gently prod you into contributing exim or ask if I could do so myself.
But, since you did the work, you should get the glory. :,)

BTW, the latest exim (i.e., 4.10) builds OOTB under Cygwin.  Thank you
very much for your porting efforts!

I would like to propose that you package using a more "normal" layout.
See the attached exim.lst for the details.

Please feel free to use the attach, if they prove useful to you:

    o build.sh: my exim build recipe
    o exim.sh:  the "meat" of a exim postinstall script that creates
      the exim user, mail group, etc.

Note that exim.sh was actually a record of the steps that I used when
installing exim on my home PC, but it is still a good starting point.

> The Cygwin port has been available for several months and seems
> to perform well. However there are several packaging decisions 
> to make. Feedback from this list would be helpful.

I will try to add only new information below...

> 1) MTAs normally require a DNS resolver, such as bind. Instead

Since I already had bind 8.3.1 installed, I built my exim against it
instead of your minires.  I don't know enough about bind to know the
version 8 versus 9 issues.  However, bind 8.3.1 builds cleanly with the
following Steven Biggs patch:

    http://sources.redhat.com/ml/cygwin/2001-08/msg00184/bind-8.3.0-T1A.CYGWIN.patch

So, another alternative is for someone to contribute bind 8.3.1 (me, you,
or Nicholas?) and build against it.  bind could be upgraded to version 9
when it's ready.

> 3) Exim comes with a number of features that require extra packages:
> a) SSL/TLS (works fine)

Yes.

> b) Perl (works for Gerrit Haase on NT, crashes for me on Win98)  

Neutral.

> c) SQL (untried)

No.

> 4) Similarly exim can support various mailbox formats (e.g. maildir)
> and authenticators. I have not tested them, having no use for them.

I vote for the extra mailbox formats.

> Are there strong opinions about including untested and somewhat
> obscure features?

Not for me, just document what is untested in the README -- for example,
this is what I did for fetchmail and SSL.

Thanks,
Jason

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