On Wednesday 28 February 2007 15:28, Felipe Augusto van de Wiel wrote:
> Hmmm... it seems that Debian is not packaging qmail, and the
> reason is not because they have the freedom to choose, but because
> they can't change a few items to comply to FHS and DFSG (Debian Free
> Software Guidelines).
Debian have a package in the non-free section called qmail-src which as you
might expect contains an unmodified tarball and some scripts. This
package installs a script called build-qmail, which builds a qmail deb
patched up with netqmail and some other debian specific patches such as
FHS compliance.
You can then use the resulting .deb on as many machines of your own as you
like - you just can't redistribute it under DJB's licence. There's even a
pause in the middle of the build for you to apply extra patches of your
own.
It might sound a bit baroque but in my experience it works well, I run
build-qmail once and my own qmail .deb is soon running on five machines.
The relevant maintainers have done the same for other DJBware, and I think
(but don't seem to have any installed at the moment) also for other stuff
that's free to distribute only if the source is unmodified.
Nick
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