My efforts over the last month to improve the qmail packages in pkgsrc have gone extremely well. I'm not done — there's always more to do — but all the hard parts are solved, some of them better than I'd thought possible.

I knew it would all pay off by saving me and others a great deal of time and effort, and that counts for a lot, but I suspect this project has been so enjoyable because of its multidisciplinary nature. Affected parties from whom I anticipated dissatisfaction and/or annoyance have instead become accommodating, or even pleased. I tried hard to make everyone happy, and I think I've succeeded. From now on, when I want to make some changes to the package, they're likely be non-controversial. And when the subject is qmail, that's really saying something!

I set up a mail server for someone last night on an old Power Mac 6500 running NetBSD. I used pkgsrc and qmail (naturally), and did all the same things I'd done for my own mail server. It was nothing new, but for some reason it felt much much cooler than last time.