[CentOS] the Postfix packages are way too old

[Whit Blauvelt]

On Fri, Jun 18, 2010 at 02:28:36PM -0700, Florin Andrei wrote:

> Fun fact: Postfix-2.3.3 has been released in August 2006. Think about that.

To be fair, RH/CentOS also ships with Sendmail-8.13.8, also from August 2006. What
a golden month for mail daemons that was.

The door's wide open for someone with the energy to put together a server
distro based on CentOS but with modern versions of essential daemons. Yes,
it wouldn't inherit certification from commercial software vendors who now
spec RH/CentOS. But major daemons like Postfix and Sendmail are very well
tested in tens of thousands of deployments in versions not over a year old
(which are significantly superior to versions from 2006, no matter how much
backporting of new features RH might have done meanwhile). They should be
stock in any current distro.

It used to be that RH's advantage was its daemons weren't as crufty as
Debian stable. But now with Ubuntu's server version solid - not nearly as
well supported by the user community as CentOS, but quite current in its
major daemon versions - those who want there to be good, widely used distros
in the RH mold five years out from now would do well to push ahead of RH in
the server space. Some sort of a CentOS+, unbound from RH's laggard ways,
but conservative in its stability, could find itself quite welcome in the
world.

Is anyone working on this? (No, not Fedora. That's not a server OS.)

Whit