Sendmail Removed From NetBSD

Derkjan de Haan writes "Christos Zoulas removed sendmail from the NetBSD source tree, after a lot of discussion about its security track-record. Sendmail will remain available from pkgsrc." But without sendmail.cf foo, how will we distinguish between the best admins and the mediocre? Sendmail was more useful as a litmus test than as an MTA ;)

Comments

Another reason to avoid NetBSD then!

[javanree]

This perfectly shows that sometimes the BSD folks can be even bigger zealots than the Linux groups... glad not to be a BSD user!
No way will I ever infest my PC with crap such as qmail (software with an attitude.... the kind of attitude you usually beat into submission with a clue-by-four)
As for the references to the bat book : even v2 is still very useable, it's just lacking a few things which got added after v8.8 (such as advanced anti-spam features)

Re:Admin test

[kashani]

The average admin would be stimied by sendmail.cf's complexity, the good admin would know how to manipulate it, and the superior admin would install Postfix.

kashani

Re:Sendmail is dying and BSD is dying

[Architect_sasyr]

Not hitting the reply button to this one was too hard... note that I am not trying to flame, just point out a few things

Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.

Very true... you will also uncover a community of people who share equally, rather than having one primary developer who says what can and cannot go into a kernel

In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.

The fact that pf is better than ipf obviously had nothing to do with it. Personally, I hate Theo, but he is very focused on what he does. There is usally a damned good reason he does things.

As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse.

wtf? OpenBSD has some of the cleanest code on the planet, it is the most secure. Where the hell did you get that from?

As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.

...

Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development.

I am not going to argue with Eric Raymond... but I would like to point at the current OpenBSD hackathon. Centralized development...

Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.

Fair enough, you can use the BSD code for anything... how does this nullify the achievements? It only means we are a little more caring and sharing than our Linux brethren.

The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.

So if I read that right, two people left one branch of the BSD operating system (assuming the big three, Net, Open and Free) and BSD has failed? That's like saying Red Hat has become corporate, so Linux is failing?

I continually read /. and see the BSD is dead posts... most of them are funny, and I will mod them thus, some are insightful and again I will mod them.

Its a pity I posted earlier, otherwise I would have modified this -10 [Fucking Stupid]... it would be nice to see someone actually consider what they post, rather than just posting blindly from one point or the other.

Incidentally, I have been using SuSE and debian for quite some time now, as well as all three BSD's. I'm not a guru, but I do have some experience...