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Re: Who is the procmail maintainer?

2004-10-19 11:52:58
2004-10-19T18:06:17 Sam:
Who is maintaining the procmail source code?

Beats me.

Although I use procmail, there have been several bugs
fixed since the 3.22 release back in September 2001.

Where are the patches? I'd like to roll them into my procmail
package:-).

And if your posting doesn't draw any responses, I'd send a copy of
it to the more prominent individuals linked off the procmail home
page, and see if they've anything to add. If they don't explain why
there's no need, why then go ahead and create the sourceforge
project. Thanks for volunteering!

As an aside, procmail seems to serve as an interesting example of
Open Source Software that has tremendous traction but no active
development.

I think --- and this is not intended as a flame, just an honest
observation --- that procmail is a peculiar beast indeed. It has
slain its application niche, entirely; it's the canonical filtering
local delivery agent. It's small and fast, so much so that repacing
an MTA's local delivery agent with procmail not only adds massive
functionality, it also routinely boosts performance dramatically.

At the same time, procmail's config language could fairly be called
odd; the way flow control is grafted in is ... well, unfamiliar,
let's be as kind as we can. The same can be said for its source code
style.

So on the one hand, the basic role has been revisited more than once
--- maildrop, part of the Courier project, is perhaps the most
widely-used alternative, but there are others. Their coding style is
more typical, their config language less surprising, but for
whatever reason none has made even a small start at kicking procmail
out of its niche. And yet at the same time, various aspects of
procmail seem to chase off serious maintainers. So we've got this
odd, unmaintained, uncontested owner of an application category. I
can't offhand think of another example.

-Bennett

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