Exim

[Pierre A. Humblet]

I'd like to propose including exim, a Mail Transfer Agent
similar to sendmail, in setup.

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.

1) MTAs normally require a DNS resolver, such as bind. Instead
I have written a library, minires, which is of general interest. 
Thus there are 3 options:
a) Include minires in the exim port 
   (as a separate dll, or as static code ?)
b) Offer it as a separate package 
   (is it helpful to have both a dll and a static lib ?)
c) Include it in the Cygwin dll 
   (single C file, about 800 lines of code and 18 exported functions) 
Which is best?

2) The source will need to include the system header files resolv.h and 
arpa/nameser.h, which are nor part of Cygwin. 
Is it OK to place them directly under /usr/include?
I am not sure how to handle the copyrights issue. Can I simply
take them off the web (say from the bind package) and delete
the parts that are unnecessary? 

One of my goals when writing minires was to interface to the Windows
resolver on Win2000/XP. This remains a goal, but I am hitting a
Windows issue. The Windows DNSQuery function 
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dns/dns_api
_2ant.asp
has an argument, pReserved, described as 
"[in, out] Returned response in original wire format. This parameter is
optional."

Having access to the original response would be very helpful, but I have been 
unable to use that parameter. Any suggestions out there?

3) Exim comes with a number of features that require extra packages:
a) SSL/TLS (works fine)
b) Perl (works for Gerrit Haase on NT, crashes for me on Win98)  
c) SQL (untried)

Should all these options be included in the precompiled code (thus 
requiring more package downloads)? 

4) Similarly exim can support various mailbox formats (e.g. maildir) 
and authenticators. I have not tested them, having no use for them. 
Are there strong opinions about including untested and somewhat obscure
features?

Thanks

Pierre