This might sound like a stupid question, but looking at the tinderbox results, it looks like qmail is in need of a new maintainer, or set of maintainers.
Let’s start with the old app-doc packages that are still lingering around since 2002, taking app-doc/ucspi-tcp-man as an example. It was originally installed as a separate package, but since 2008, with the 0.88-r17 revision of sys-apps/ucspi-tcp it was merged in. But it took two year to start a stable request by the maintainer and it was only this year that it finally went stable. A similar issue happened with daemontools and both of those required me to go through and remove the old ebuilds and the -man packages that cause so much trouble with my tinderbox setup.
But there are many more issues with the related packages; for instance the huge list of collisions on man pages only for many qmail-related packages, or the fact that some ebuilds have bogus src_test functions (which I’m now removing myself without even waiting for maintainers at this point).
All in all, the long series of bugs, some of which appears to be also security-related, makes me wonder if we wouldn’t need a more “hands-on” maintainers team for qmail and the rest of the djb software, which usually seems to be quite tightly related. So if you are a qmail user in Gentoo, please look at the proxy maintainers project that Markos announced two days ago, your help will be appreciated.
Maybe this is already done but how about Portage informing users of such unmaintained packages of the possibility to become their maintainer and if no one cares then moving such ebuilds to an official overlay, say, gentoo-deprecated or gentoo-unmaintained and if they then become incompatible with even stable Portage tree, archiving them as a reference in case someone later decides to resurrect it.
I would’ve liked to know nobody cares about qmail in Gentoo before I chose it as my MTA. Thanks guys.
I still operate a netqmail server. I set it up a LONG time ago and try not to touch it as I don’t want to anger the goblins within.
I`m using netqmail on my personal mailserver. Will think about proxy maintaining, but I`m not sure.
I still run and use qmail running on Gentoo on a few systems. I would happily help maintain qmail and several other applications as a developer if recruiting and devrel would get out of the way and let me contribute and get work done.Unfortunately some bugs which make complete sense get ignored… For example bug # 323517. Not sure how proxy maintaining would make that any better. Proxy maintaining requires a devs time to make it happen and/or commit. Unless Sunrise is the new official tree.
I use Qmail since 1997 and the simple installation under Gentoo was my biggest reason when I switched from Redhat to Gentoo 6 years ago. Many people means that Qmail is too old, but it is save and modular – the smtp protocol is much older (this protocol needs a renewal!!! Since this day I want to use Qmail). I manage hundrets of domains with Qmail in conjunction with vpopmail, dovecot, simcan, spamassassin, clamav, squirremail and the perfect managing webtool Qmailadmin. It’s a perfect Qmail toaster with webmail imap pop3 …Please don’t let this great server die.
I absolutely do use qmail on Gentoo on several servers. I would also be interested in helping to maintain qmail on Gentoo.
i have a few instalations of qmail with gentoo too and i like it…