Update For Exim Governance Report

Philip Hazel wrote this document (http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/cs-exim.xml) for OSS Watch back in 2006 on the sustainability and history of Exim. We have been asked for updates on the state of things at present (December 2008).

See http://lists.exim.org/lurker/message/20081215.142246.cafd789d.en.html

2008 Status

Philip Hazel retired from the University of Cambridge in September 2007, having headed up the development of Exim throughout its history. In the run up to his retirement a number of changes were made to the way the project works, with a publically visible (with a small number of committers) CVS archive of source and documentation made available on a University of Cambridge system as well as a publically visible bug tracking system. Exim releases after 4.50 (Early 2005) had a number of changes committed directly by various authors (around 6 people in total) into CVS, although the majority of changes were still committed by Philip.

There has been one release (version 4.69) since Philip retired, although there are a significant number of bug fixes or enhancements currently within the source repository. We expect there to be a further release in the next few months. However release management is a significant task, and involves considerable work on the part of those involved - this means that releases are likely to be infrequent unless someone takes on that role.

At this time there is no single Project Leader managing the project, but instead a group of a few people that have been involved with Exim for several years. One of the particular problems is that many of those involved are no longer involved in managing mail systems for the majority of their time, and so have less immediate interest in pushing further development. Exim is also a mature project - it has wide functionality and is fairly feature complete. Many of the requests for additional functionality tend to be addressing niches which have not attracted development effort. Email handling issues, protocols and solutions are also moving along relatively slowly compared to the changes when the project started.

The mailing lists are still well used for support of exim, with a combination of new and experienced users posting on the lists. The versions of Debian supplying Exim version 3 have mostly become obsolete, so meaning that versions of Exim before version 4 can now be realistically considered obsolete.

At present, in my role as non-leader, I expect Exim to continue in a maintenance role for a number of years, unless and until significant new email handling functionality is required, more people join as active members of the project team, or another set of mail handling software takes mindshare from exim.