I guess open source authors can work however they wish, but the sheer disdain displayed for good-but-differing practices is depressing.

So, now I'm a "kid" (with the obvious insinuation that I'm dumb and inexperienced) if I think maybe perhaps version control is a good idea, especially for open source projects that actually want contributions? Neat.

And git is "bloatware"? Is that guy running on a Commodore 64 or something? Bizarre.

Wietse uses source control. He just doesn't open it up to the hoi polloi.

In the era before social coding (when postfix originated), this wasn't uncommon for open source projects. qmail and sendmail didn't have public VCS either.

Not everything has to be like everything else. Wietse is a dedicated, responsive, talented steward of his project. We don't need to see his WIP commits, and he might not have the inclination to accept patches from unvetted strangers.

I'm ok with letting him run it the way he thinks works best.

It seems like the very old projects are very set in their ways (unsurprisingly). I complained about ImageMagick's process a while ago to no avail: http://www.imagemagick.org/discourse-server/viewtopic.php?f=...

Disclaimer: I am a primary maintainer for a couple open source projects and I contribute to a few others for 10+ years now. And I've seen quite a few email threads similar to this one :)

1) If you don't like how postfix is run then feel free to use other tools, fork it, or start your own project. This is open source and you have the power to do it better. If you are indeed right then your project will be successful. Put the money (effort) where you mouth is.

2) You can politely suggest something but you will get a much better traction if you first establish your reputation among people who work on this project by contributing code, documentation, whatever or even simply answering the questions in the mailing list (after about a year it gets really boring since questions are always the same).

3) (IMHO) There is no silver bullet. Git (or any other tool) will not make your code/project better. Moreover you might find that Git (or any other tool) is not perfect and there are problems with it in a particular environment (hint: there is no free lunch). Recognizing the tradeoffs is a very important skill for a software developer. Learn it early and you'll make less mistakes.

People can run their own projects how they want. But this is not just a question of preference -- an open source project developed this way is strictly less useful than one that exposes its true fine-grained history.

They quite literally throw away (or keep locked up, which is the same for us non-insiders) information that is relevant to understanding and debugging the project.

The only reason for that is misplaced vanity.

Note that nobody is asking to see your code before you're ready. You still get to choose when to push that fancy new release to the public repository. And nobody is asking you for write access.

It is pretty off-putting to me that such a critical piece of infrastructure isn't developed completely in the open, especially with such a large amount of security code. Companies get criticized all the time for this style of open source development.

Someone did a github mirror: https://github.com/vdukhovni/postfix

Their worklflow seems to be:

    * Make a change
    * Write the meaning of the change in the HISTORY file
    * Release a tarball of the source with the change

Postfix (1998) predates Git (2005) by 7 years. That isn't to say that a VCS of some kind wouldn't have its benefits, but it's completely up to the author's decision.

I'm seeing a lot of misinformation in the thread about what public source control entails. Scary!

I just read a thread about a bunch of grumpy software traditionalists who are probably close to my age, but the similarity stops there.

I have been working with software for over 20 years and I still think git is the coolest thing to hit development teams since dynamic languages.

I read somewhere that postfix is used by around 30% of the internets to send mail. That's really concerning because we have no history for the code, just a code drop. Given the amount of criticism for projects like android (which does have a public git repo but is also a code drop), I posted this here as I was wondering what people thought of such projects.

These days I think of free software to have a public version control as a given. So coming across this was a shocker for me. I think Wietse is free to do whatever he wants but it's just sad that we have to depend on this software so much :(

Is there something like Postfix, except it has useful features that work out of the box without a lot of extra configuration that is hard to figure out? So I could actually send/receive encrypted email that would pass big provider's filters consistently without needing to use a mail API?

There must be some similar projects to Postfix that are written in modern programming languages and do use source control etc.

You're confused. You are the loser. I am the winner. The winner dictates terms.

http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Doc/Demands.html

He uses source control; he just doesn't have a _public_ one. So what?