Hello:

On 30 Aug 2024 at 20:42, Brad Campbell via Dng wrote:

> ... Exim maintainers kinda dropped the ball ...
You are much kinder than I am or can be.
In my book, they *did* drop the ball.

And their reply to my bug report clearly shows a less than stellar
attitude to the issue.

> A fairly basic issue ...
Which could have been easily and elegantly solved by *not* telling
the person upgrading that keeping the configuration was the default.

Clearly *not* what an upgrade that would absolutely not work with any
and all previous configurations needs to see on screen.

Instead, this would have been more fitting:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
WARNING

If you apply this very important upgrade your configuration files
will NOT be used, a basic skeleton configuration put in place and
should be edited/ajusted to your specific use case.

See new_config.readme
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: bug report

> ... can see the package maintainers perspective.
Of course and so can I.

But it is not a *one size fits all*, particularly when it was a well
known fact to the maintainers that using it (in this *very* specific
upgrade case) would screw up everything and leave you with a
non-working MTA.

With a non-working MTA, I spent the longest time totally unaware of
what was going on in my box.

> ... seems you got stung.
Yes I did.
Spent hours on end trying to see what was going on.

> If it makes you feel any better ...
What made me feel betetr was being able (with help from people at
Dev1, as always) to find the problem and thus able to report it.

> ... first major breakage on an upgrade.
I suspect that the maintainers were caught off-guard and faced a huge
security risk, not to mention having to deal with the *21 nails*
moniker.

https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/05/21_nails_in_exim_mail/

Maybe did not think things through?
What can I say except *shit happens*?

But for me, the problem was (more than anything) their attitude.

> I agree on the basic desktop MTA ...
Hopefully, Devuan may eventually agree to keep Exim out of the
desktop installations.

Dragonfly works just fine.

Thank you very much for your input.

Best,

A.