Mail selection options in sysinstall(8).

Chris Pressey cpressey at catseye.mine.nu
Fri Sep 19 12:13:56 PDT 2003


On Fri, 19 Sep 2003 20:20:56 +0200
des at des.no (Dag-Erling Smørgrav) wrote:

> Chris Pressey <cpressey at catseye.mine.nu> writes:
> > des at des.no (Dag-Erling Smørgrav) wrote:
> > > No, because QMail needs patches to run correctly on FreeBSD (in
> > > fact, it requires patches to run correctly on *any* system,
> > > because DJB doesn't want to lose face by admitting that QMail
> > > contains bugs, and therefore hasn't updated the official
> > > distribution since mid-1998).
> > Could you elaborate on that?  Unless I'm mistaken, the only patches
> > in/usr/ports/qmail/files are patches needed for qmail to *install*
> > correctly - and all the WITH_*_PATCH options refer to optional
> > patches.
> 
> Performance under high load will be abysmal if you leave out the
> bigqueue patches, and you may also want to increase the hash size.
> The latter is problematic because qmail built with one hash size can't
> operate on a queue generated by qmail built with a different hash
> size, so you need to be very careful when upgrading.  I don't believe
> the port allows you to change the hash size, though...

That would be a nice touch.  I still don't understand, though, is it a
correctness issue, or a performance issue?  My server is not under high
load, and qmail sure seems to work correctly.

Googling, the only plausible bug report I could find was that some OS'es
interpret the IP address 0.0.0.0 to mean the local machine, and some
disallow it as an illegal IP address.  It seems that qmail's intention
is that 0.0.0.0 is illegal (as it is on OpenBSD(?))  If that is not also
the case for FreeBSD, that might mean a qmail binary distribution is out
of the question (based on Dan's statement "If there's something about a
system (compiler, libraries, kernel, hardware, whatever) that changes
qmail's behavior, then that platform is /not/ supported, and you are
/not/ permitted to distribute binaries.")

-Chris


More information about the freebsd-stable mailing list