Import of DragonFly Mail Agent

[Mark Felder]

On Mon, Feb 24, 2014, at 8:56, Daniel Kalchev wrote:
> 
> On 24.02.14 13:47, Thomas Mueller wrote:
> > I don't believe BSD users use base system of itself to send and receive email.  They use ports (FreeBSD) or equivalent in other BSDs.
> 
> One of the beauties of the BSD 'base system' is that upon installation 
> you have an usable workstation/server environment that can be 
> immediately used for most Internet-related tasks -- and this most 
> certainly includes SMTP. Or NTP. Or... used to include DNS.
> 

And one of the warts is our dedication to long support on FreeBSD
releases; FreeBSD 8 is still supported with 8.3 and 8.4 releases.
RELENG_8 was branched in August of 2009. FreeBSD 8.4 has an estimated
EoL of June 30 2015. This is nearly 6 years since the original release
-- an incredible amount of time to be maintaining such complex software.
(Though I'm aware that Sendmail's release process is rather slow)

> We can strip pieces of FreeBSD off and end up with an kernel. Or we 
> could keep the system very much usable out of the box.
> 

Imagine a world where everything in FreeBSD is a package and we have a
working "PROVIDES" framework. Upon installation you can choose the
software that "provides" the MTA role. Same for DNS, NTP, database,
webserver... That would be a great accomplishment along with a framework
to create a master install image utilizing the options/packages you
desire. I think this type of thing is definitely plausible if we keep
moving forward. My personal opinion remains that complex software is
better served/secured/maintained when it is handled in ports not in
base.