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Date:      Wed, 22 May 2002 16:22:49 -0700
From:      Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com>
To:        Christopher Weimann <cweimann@k12hq.com>
Cc:        Andre Oppermann <oppermann@pipeline.ch>, Adrian Filipi-Martin <adrian@ubergeeks.com>, FreeBSD Hackers List <freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: tuning a CPU bound server
Message-ID:  <3CEC2849.CBAFE41A@mindspring.com>
References:  <3CEC0E35.26DBB385@pipeline.ch> <20020522181822.A51741@mail.k12us.com>

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Christopher Weimann wrote:
> Not intended as a slight against DJB ( althought I do realize it
> looked that way ). I LOVE qmail, look at my headers.
> 
> But DJB does not introduce any of Terry's "network effects".

Sure he does.

By not integrating the patches, he ends up with many patches
sitting out there that end up being conflicting, whereas if
they had integrated the code, they would not be conflicting.

There's really no difference between patches posted to web
sites and patches which are posted to usenet.

People are in exactly the same boat with qmail as people were
with 386BSD, before I wrote the patchkit, and hand-resolved
the conflicts between the patches.  Of for that matter, the
same boat people were in with the UMich LDAP code, until I
hand resolved those conflicts, too, and posted my "megapatch"
on FreeBSD.org (if you will check the OpenLDAP CVS repository,
you will see that "import the FreeBSD patches" was the very
first thing they did after importing the UMich code at the
very start of the project).

Actually, people are worse off.  At least with NetBSD and
FreeBSD, it was possible to derive code from 386BSD, and the
same for OpenLDAP being able to derive code from UMich code.
With qmail, the license prevents this.

The best you can do, without a license change, or active adoption
of the patches by DJB, is form an active community, and then
run a "patchkit"-type operation.

The more people who use qmail, and need a minor feature tweak
that can't be done in the context of configuration data, the
larger the conflict domain for the various needs patch sets.

I think the qmail user base will never rival the sendmail or
postfix user bases because of this.  The network shakes apart
at a very low level of driving.

-- Terry

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