Dream 57/Amiga_Dream_57.iso/Linux/Net/smail-3.2.0.103-README

Text File | 1998-10-15 | 13KB | 274 lines

#ident    "@(#)smail:RELEASE-3_2_0_103:README,v 1.17 1998/09/21 05:47:48 woods Exp"


       This is Smail (RELEASE-3_2_0_103) by the Smail development group.


INTRODUCTION

Smail-3 is a Mail Transport Agent, i.e. a program used for sending and
receiving electronic mail.

Its job is to accept mail messages from sources on the local machine, or
from remote hosts, and deliver those messages to the appropriate
destinations, be they to remote hosts or to files or programs on the
local machine.  It is not intended to be a user interface for reading
and submitting mail.

This release of Smail is based entirely on Smail-3.1 by Ronald S. Karr
and Landon Curt Noll.  The majority of sources under this directory are
copyright by the authors, whereas code under the ./pd/ subdirectory is
available in the public domain.  Code in the ./contrib/ directory is
owned by the contributing authors, who should be consulted if you have
any questions about distribution or usage restrictions.

See the file COPYING for information on copying restrictions that apply
to all files in the release other than files in the contrib and pd
directories.

See the file INSTALL for information on how to configure and install the
Smail software.  PLEASE CHECK ALL THE SECTIONS OF THE INSTALL FILE.  In
particular, some later sections describe system and environment specific
configuration details that you should be aware of, if they apply to your
situation.

Users of all previous releases must review the CHANGES file to see what
has changed or to see if some previously encountered problems have been
fixed.  You *will* have to re-write your conf/EDITME files if you last
used a pre-3.2 release.

This document talks about development and releases; problems; mailing
lists; how to to send bug reports, change requests, patches, etc.; and
of course gives some of the many acknowledgments for, and history of,
Smail.


OBTAINING NEW VERSIONS OF SMAIL

The official distribution can be obtained from ftp.planix.com with FTP
using the following URL:

          ftp://ftp.planix.com/pub/Smail/

Patch releases and new beta release can also be retreived from this same
directory.


CHANGES TO SMAIL DEVELOPMENT PROCESS

In June 1994, Ronald S Karr, who had almost single handedly run the
Smail-3 development up to that time, decided that he was unable to keep
up with the work required to keep smail development going.  An ad-hoc
development team was subsequently set up, initially with the task of
getting a smail 3.1.29 release built which fixes the security problems
found in smail 3.1.28, and to continue future Smail-3 development.  It
was also intended that a group will work on development of further fixes
and changes for Smail-3 and hopefully, eventually, a re-write.

Since the release of smail 3.1.29, Nigel Metheringham was responsible
for a great deal of work in creating many development releases, and
incorporating numerous changes and fixes from the ad-hoc team.

With the release of Smail-3.2, a new group is being formed, made up of
past participants and new, who will all have direct access to the
official Smail-3 sources repository.  Please see the section below
regarding bugs and patches for further information.

This development group is intended to be small enough to work quickly,
and large enough that the work can be spread out to prevent single
person overload.  If you are interested in joining the group then please
contact the bugs address given below.  We are always interested in
receiving bug fixes and/or new features patches whether or not you are a
member of the development group -- again see below for how to do this.

Note that a complete re-write of Smail is probably never going to
happen.  There is now one new work-alike mailer (Exim) available, and
there are several alernative mailers too (ZMailer, qmail), with at least
one more on the way (VMailer).  VMailer (and to some extend ZMailer)
have even better support than Smail for gatewaying between diverse
networks (eg. UUCP, X.400, etc.).  Given this state of affairs it is
likely best to put new efforts into supporting one or more of these new
mailers which have already benefited from new design efforts and simply
maintain Smail until its wide installed base has a chance to change over
to one of these newer mailers.


KNOWN PROBLEMS IN SMAIL RELEASE-3_2_0_103

There are a small number of things that are known to cause problems, but
which have not been addressed in the current release.  Here is a summary
of the serious problems:

 *  Spill-over spool directories don't always work correctly, so don't
    use them.  A spill-over directory is a second directory listed in
    the spool_dirs configuration variable.

 *  Smail does not always limit the size of mail messages.  There is a
    configuration parameter for this, but it is currently ignored
    in all cases except for ESMTP configurations, where the SIZE option
    is specified to the remote system with the maximum accepted message
    size.

  * Locking over NFS will not work because of bad interactions between
    NFS attribute caching and the order of operations performed by
    smail.  The work-around is to turn off attribute caching.  There's a
    comment in the appendfile driver source that says how it should be
    done in order to make it at least possible for NFS locking to work.

Please consult the ToDo file for a list of the known minor problems.

In addition, there are some features that Smail really should have, and
that are intended for a future release.  Some of these are:

 *  The ability to deliver multiple messages per connection to a
    destination host.  The proposed solution for this also involves a
    separate Smail daemon for delivery, similar to the organization of
    the Zmailer program by Rayan Zachariassen of UUNET Canada and
    formerly of the University of Toronto.  Dan Bernstein's qmail; as
    well as the AT&T Research UNIX, SysVr4 native, and Plan 9 mailer,
    sometimes known as UPAS; also have similar designs.

 *  Smaller mail queuer programs (i.e., rmail, rsmtp), that do not have
    all of Smail linked into them.  This would make smail more palatable
    on smaller systems.

Please consult the PROJECTS file for a list of other important things.


SUPPORT FOR JANET MAIL

If you are not in the UK, please ignore this paragraph -- you don't want
to know.  Smail now contains limited support for JANET mail (the
reverse-order domain system used in the United Kingdom).  This support
was added by Philip Hazel <[e-mail]>.  The smail3 distribution
provides only those hooks that must be in the smail binary itself.
Fortunately JANET mail is probably not widely used any more and indeed
Philip has gone on to bigger and better things as the author of a brand
new smail-like mailer called Exim <[e-mail]>.


FUTURE SMAIL RELEASES

If anybody would like to take on the large task of making Smail a
leaner, cleaner, and more adaptable program, please let us know.  If
nobody ever comes forward, then we will probably have to consider the
full rewrite dead, and continue hacking on the current sources.

I am interested in volunteers for large, and medium-sized tasks.  If you
are interested, please send us e-mail.

The next major release of of Smail (if there is one! ;-) will have been
converted to use the GNU Autoconf (and Automake) utilities for system
configuration.

Smail will no doubt be popularly known as Smail-3 for a long time to
come.  However it is expected that Smail will follow the Berkeley CSRG
version numbering scheme for future releases.  We will increment the
third number (3.7, 3.7.1, 3.7.2, etc) whenever we generate a release of
bug fixes (what might traditionally be also known as a "patch" release),
and increment the second number, or the minor release number, (3.7, 3.8)
whenever we add any new features or make other user-visible changes, and
lastly we'll increment the first number, or the major release number,
(3.9, 4.1) whenever we make major or architectural changes.  We'll also
throw in a smattering of GNU-isms too -- the alpha- and beta-test
releases of upcoming proper releases will have a ".80" or ".90"
(respectively) appended to the current release number (3.7.1.80,
3.7.1.81, 3.7.1.90, 3.7.2; or 4.1.80, 4.1.81, 4.1.82, 4.1.90, 4.1.91,
4.2).  You'll note this effectively caps the maximum patch level, or
minor release number, ceiling at ".79", and limits the number of alpha
releases to 10.  Unfortunately it does not limit the number of beta
releases!  ;-)  If you see "-Pre" appended to the release number then
you're seeing an intermediate development release.


GENERAL ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The Smail-3.2 release now exists, thanks to the efforts of Chip
Salzenberg, Nigel Metheringham, Greg A. Woods, and a cast of others.

These original Smail-3.1 acknowledgments from Ronald S. Karr:

    Some smail3 users go back quite a ways and have provided
    invaluable help, patches, and comments over the years.  Here's a
    few that I can remember: Andy Beals, Mark H. Coburn, Karl
    Denninger, Mark Hartman, Shane McCaran, Tim Mitchell, Gordon
    Moffett, Lyndon Nerenberg, Dave Rand, Andy Rundquist, Chip
    Salzenberg, Johan Vromans, Lauren Weinstein, Syd Weinstein, Bill
    Wisner, and Jon Zeeff.

    A special thanks to Landon Curt Noll <[e-mail]> who
    started me on the road of post-college life and caused me to
    write smail in the process.  He also helped design and implement
    the first several versions.  Without him, smail3.1 certainly
    would never have been written.

    A special thanks also to Larry Auton, who wrote smail2.5.
    Without him, Smail3.1 would have, at the very least, been called
    something else.  He also provided valuable encouragement and
    comment during the earlier phases of smail design and
    development.


BUGS, COMMENTS, AND PATCH SUBMISSION

Please generate and send bug reports and/or fixes by using the smailbug
utility (a customised version of GNATS send-pr) included with Smail.

A list of open PRs can be obtained by sending e-mail to this address:

    [e-mail]

with a subject line consisting of the string "query-pr -qx".  Other
options to query-pr(1) can also be used to refine the query, or to
obtain the full text of a PR.  Please see the GNATS documentation for
more information about the query-pr command.

There are now two discussion lists started by Lyndon Nerenberg
<[e-mail]> and now maintained by Daryl Campbell
<[e-mail]>:  smail3-users and smail3-wizards.

To subscribe to either of these lists send mail to either:

    [e-mail]

and/or to:

    [e-mail]

I do not have any connection with these lists, other than the fact that
I maintain the software they discuss.  So, please don't send list change
requests to me.

Please send questions, comments, or anything else you have to say either
to me, or to the discussion groups.

I vastly prefer receiving bug fixes and enhancements that are clearly
differentiated.  I don't always know what to do with large patches that
contain many bugs and enhances folded into the same context diffs.
Please try and keep it to one fix or enhancement per patch.  If your
change modifies the external interface of smail -- i.e. more config
options, command-line switches, new programs, etc., then please also
include patches for the manual pages and documentation.  Patches should
ideally be in context or unidiff format, and should have "Index:" lines
to specify the file to be patched.  Finally, *please* include ChangeLog
style entries to describe your changes.  Incomplete patches will greatly
lower their priority for consideration.  Remember too the best way to
submit patches is by using the smailbug utility.

[ Again, generating patches with your local changes is quite easy if you
employ CVS as a source control tool. ]

If you are a past Smail-3 maintainer, and/or you've recently supplied a
number of good patches, and you are willing to volunteer some time to
help with the future maintenance of Smail-3, your application can be
considered for membership in the Smail-3 developers group.  This
membership will allow you access to the master CVS source repository and
our GNATS bugs database.  Please see the charter for the development
group in the file ./Smail3-devel.

--
                            Greg A. Woods

<[e-mail]>                  VE3TCP                 robohack!woods
Planix, Inc. <[e-mail]>; Secrets of the Weird <[e-mail]>