[Pkg-exim4-users] Dropping support for users of Debianhowto-vexim

[Marc Haber]

Hi,

In the last weeks, I have been bombarded with a lot of newbie-level
support questions. In most cases, I found out that the people asking
these questions have used the directions listed in
http://www.debianhowto.de/de:howtos:sarge:exim4_vexim2_courier_mailman
which basically say "disable the Debian magic and use our exim4.conf".

This morning, I asked the makers of Debianhowto.de to clarify that
their directions take the "Debian" from exim4 and that the Debian
exim4 maintainers cannot do any support on the configuration generated
by users of this HOWTO, and that this HOWTO generates quite an amount
of support burden for us.
(https://lists.debianhowto.de/pipermail/howto/2005-November/000197.html,
German).

I received an answer
(https://lists.debianhowto.de/pipermail/howto/2005-November/000198.html,
unreadable in the archive), which I had to quote back to the archive
to get it in the archive in a human-readable way
(https://lists.debianhowto.de/pipermail/howto/2005-November/000199.html,
German as well). It basically says "you suck, get lost, we have
backing of the community", which is quite easy to say if you unload
your support burden on other people.

I am therefore tempted to drop any support for vexim-based
configurations and to send all people asking for support towards the
debianhowto.de people who have quite clearly demonstrated that they do
not care about the work load of the people providing Debian's exim.

If nobody from the Debian exim4 community objects, I'm going to place
warnings regarding this in our documentation, on Debian's exim4 web
pages and on the list description for pkg-exim4-users.

May I ask for your comments?

Greetings
Marc

[Cc'ing the Debianhowto list, where this mail will have to be manually
approved since they only allow subscribers to post (as we do as well).
I will also re-use a substantial part of this message on my blog
tonight, see http://blog.zugschlus.de/categories/15-Debian-English]

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