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Comment by drinchev | Hacker News Reader

Wow three letters, so many stories in my head.

Here are my top 5 reasons why I think qmail + daemontools + djbdns is great :

    1. bugs free code ( well almost ) ;
    2. fast & memory efficient ;
    3. following "everything is a file" philosophy ;
    4. easy to configure and more

I've been using this suite for almost 10 years now. I've never found any alternative. BIND was too complicated in terms of configuration for me and also got updates almost every 2 weeks ( 8 years back it was much much harder than doing "apt-get ..." )

Qmail is also flawless piece of software. It basically taught me how you should separate processes and how to use linux accounts properly for the daemons. Amazing.

Finally the only thing I rely on right now is daemontools. I'm using it for all of my production nodejs websites and even for a tool that I call "deployer" which automatically stops, updates and starts a daemon from the suite.

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Sorry, 8 years ago it was 2007 and updating BIND was done precisely by doing 'apt-get ...'. I still have a server running same installation of Debian since 2005 (copied from one HDD to another and to a virtual server then), and it's been apt-get updated all the way through.

I know you're having fun showing off how easy it was to update BIND, but how many times have you had to update it since that time? Now how many times did he have to update the DJB name server?

I don't know, I'm not counting them. And there is no doubt djbdns is better than BIND regarding security - it's just you can't use "8 years ago updating stuff was hard" as an argument, because it was not.

8 years ago I was using slackware as my main server distribution. Yes there is no "apt-get ..." in slackware even nowadays, but back then debian switched to aptitude at around 2005 ( sarge ) [1].

I remember around 2010 I reached uptime 3 years on one of the machines, with my good old patched slackware 10. Now imagine me switching to "apt-get ..." because of "easy security updates" for a tool that lived less than my uptime was.

Yes this is the time that I had to use exactly this argument, but against doing precisely that.

1: https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/project-history/ch-detail...

Qmail is far from flawless. It could be better if patches were allowed, but no, that's forbidden.

As much as DJB is a talented programmer, his attitude towards outside contributions comes across as extremely hostile.

I can't take any of the DJB projects seriously because they're always in a state of permanent abandonment and maintainers are impossible to find. They serve as art pieces more than practical, useful software.

He's certainly from the old school of development where tight control over your software ensures it's not exposed to risk from external developers, and of course he's entitled to do that. The consequence is that severely limits how this software can be used.

qmail has been in the public domain since 2007, and patches have always been allowed.

Most of your other statements seem similarly at odds with reality to me, but they’re more statements of your taste than anything else.

Why should software be in a state of permanent development?

"I can't take any of the DJB projects seriously because they're always in a state of permanent abandonment and maintainers are impossible to find. They serve as art pieces more than practical, useful software."

There are plenty of "maintainers", just search for the qmail mailing list, if that is impossible then I'm not sure what to say to you, but what you say is bunk.

Software needs to be in a state of permanent development because nothing is static. Operating systems change. Usage patterns change.

Seeing Qmail rot on the vine is heart-breaking, but that's exactly what happened.

I used to use Qmail exclusively, but over time it got harder and harder to install an up-to-date version of it, requiring more and more "unofficial" patches to get it actually working. After too much of that I gave up and went with Postfix.

I don't want "mailing lists", I don't want Bugzilla, I don't want SourceForge. I want people that respond to something like GitHub issues where the interaction is painless and productive.

It's neither fast/memory efficient nor easy to configure. Back when we created our email infrastructure (10yrs ago) we deeply evaluated qmail and postfix. Postfix beats qmail on both counts by a huge margin.

The rest of the qualities do stand. We kept tinydns from that evaluation, and gladly so. It's a marvelous piece of software, never breaks on its own, requires near zero maintenance.

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