Dear Exim4 Maintainers,
thank you for maintaining Exim. This bug report is pure luxury. Usually
I file
them because they are inconsistent, because of typos or because of a lack of
information. This one is about possibly too much information.
What I remember from a glimpse to the "Developer's reference" is the
demand to
give the person having a look at the description some rationale whether to
install the package or not. The fourth paragraph of (1) has lots of Debian
specific information. IMHO the most important sentence there is "Please ...
only write to the upstream exim-users mailing list if you are sure that your
question is not Debian-specific."
I suggest to shorten this paragraph and to give more information on Exim,
perhaps by borrowing from upstream (2):
Exim is a message transfer agent (MTA) ... . In style it is similar
to Smail
3, but its facilities are more general. There is a great deal of
flexibility
in the way mail can be routed, and there are extensive facilities for
checking incoming mail. Exim can be installed in place of Sendmail,
although
the configuration of Exim is quite different.
Furthermore I have the impression that Exim is an important part of the
Debian
infrastructure. It's on my system and I'm quite shure not to have
installed it
separately.
My thougths on the content of some revised standard boilerplate:
Exim is a message transfer agent (MTA), similar in style to Smail
3, but with more general facilities. There is a great deal of flexibility
in the way mail can be routed, and there are extensive facilities for
checking incoming mail. It can replace Sendmail, but the configuration of
Exim is quite different.
Exim is a vital component of a standard Debian system, as it is used for
<... something I did find out yet>.
There is a lot of Debian specific infrastructure: <perhaps some links>.
Please only write to the upstream exim-users mailing list if you are sure
that your question is not Debian-specific.
Kind regards,
Martin
1: http://ddtp.debian.net/ddt.cgi?desc_id=87133
2: http://www.exim.org/
Martin Eberhard Schauer wrote: Unfortunately the note is addressed to the wrong person --- in a large, multi-user installation (think "university"), the people who would consider writing to the exim-users list are not the same people as read the package description to decide whether to install it anyway. A quick note on the existence of "careful Debian-specific configuration that might make the package unrecognizable to people who know the software from elsewhere" or something along those lines might help, though. In theory, a pointer to the wiki page could also help people decide whether to install the package, though in practice, the page is too cluttered to help easily that way.
Martin Eberhard Schauer wrote: This looks like a bad source to copy from, given that it obviously hasn't been updated since Exim overtook Smail a decade or more ago. Smail's homepage offers a version 3.2, a warning that anything less than the upcoming version 3.3 is dangerously insecure on GNU/Linux, and a last-updated timestamp in 2006. mail-transport-agent (so that cronjob output can reach its intended destination), and exim4 is the default MTA in Debian. I gather there is intermittent debate about whether it's still appropriate for Debian to prefer a "heavyweight" mailserver like Exim rather than some minimalist SMTP server that's limited to punting everything in the general direction of gmail.com, but for now exim4 is what you get on a default Debian install. The middle sentence might be an improvement on the current package description, but the comparisons with Smail and even Sendmail are fairly pointless. Debian users won't be using Exim to "replace Sendmail", since they could only ever have got Sendmail installed in the first place if they'd actively chosen it. And even if this was a good description of Exim 4, it wouldn't be an adequate description of the package exim4, which needs to mention the fact it's a dependency metapackage. I would agree that the huge pileup of information sources in that paragraph is a bad idea (unless the idea is to bury things so that the maintainers can shout at users for not having noticed them). Is it so difficult to arrange for each of those locations to point at a single authoritative source that either has all the information or at least all the signposts? I mean, the list mentions that there's an FAQ, but not where it is; couldn't you just give the URL, and have the first entry in it warn against taking Debian bugs upstream? My own tentative suggestion for the whole thing would be something along these lines: Description: flexible mail transport agent - metapackage Exim (v4) is a mail transport agent with a great deal of flexibility in the way mail can be routed, and extensive facilities for checking incoming mail. Comprehensive upstream documentation is supplied in /usr/share/doc/exim4-base/spec.txt.gz, but many configuration details are Debian-specific, so before reporting a bug, read http://wiki.debian.org/PkgExim4UserFAQ . This metapackage depends on the essential components for a basic installation of Exim 4. (I say "comprehensive" to avoid repeating "extensive".) Then for instance exim4-base could be: Description: $SUITE - support files $BOILERPLATE . This package provides support files needed by all Exim 4 daemon packages (exim4-daemon-light, exim4-daemon-heavy, or an exim4-daemon-custom package locally built from source). And exim4-daemon-light would be something like: Description: $SUITE - lightweight flavor $BOILERPLATE . This package provides a version of the Exim 4 daemon with only basic features enabled. It works well with the standard setups that are provided by Debian and includes support for TLS encryption and the dlopen patch to allow dynamic loading of a local_scan function.
Justin B Rye wrote: Better. But it can be shortened even further, by observing: - since this is a Debian package, the usual place to look for documentation would be /usr/share/doc/exim4/README.Debian. And that works. - since this is a Debian package, the usual way to report bugs is to look at /usr/share/doc/exim4/README.Debian first. And that works, though maybe the warning 1.2. Getting Support For your questions and comments, there is a [2]Debian-specific mailing list. Please ask Debian-specific questions there, and only write to the upstream exim-users mailing list if you are sure that your question is not Debian-specific. should be more prominent. So we can write: Description: flexible mail transport agent - metapackage Exim (v4) is a mail transport agent with a great deal of flexibility in the way mail can be routed, and extensive facilities for checking incoming mail. Comprehensive upstream documentation is included. . Many configuration details are Debian-specific, as described at <http://wiki.debian.org/PkgExim4UserFAQ>. . This metapackage depends on the essential components for a basic installation of Exim 4.