Date: Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:26:47 +0100 (CET) From: Oliver Fromme <olli@lurza.secnetix.de> To: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Why is sendmail is part of the system and not a package? Message-ID: <200910281526.n9SFQlK0038627@lurza.secnetix.de> In-Reply-To: <44aazc8khl.fsf@lowell-desk.lan>
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Lowell Gilbert wrote: > Gonzalo Nemmi <gnemmi@gmail.com> writes: > > On Tuesday 27 October 2009 7:22:22 pm Lowell Gilbert wrote: > > > Gonzalo Nemmi <gnemmi@gmail.com> writes: > > > > Well .. someday UFS will be replaced by ZFS .. I don't see a reason why UFS should be removed anytime soon. If that happens, then that would be in a very distant future when nobody is using UFS anymore (and I'm not talking about FreeBSD only). > > And what would you say ... removing perl was more daunting that > > replacing Senmail? Honest question. > > Perl was harder. No question. *Replacing* sendmail is completely different from *removing* perl, both technically and historically. > I would actually be just as happy to see *no* MTA in the base system, > but the installer work to keep that from violating the Principle Of > Least Astonishment is even more tricky than replacing sendmail with > something else. There needs to be at least an LDA in the base system, unless you don't care about cron jobs and other things working correctly. I think many users *do* care. It doesn't have to be a fully-featured MTA, though, but at least it should be capable of queueing, remote delivery, support for aliases, forwarding and a few other things. Sendmail currently does all of that on FreeBSD out of the box with zero configuration efforts, just one line in rc.conf (sendmail_enable="NO") which will start up the queue daemon, listen for local mails and deliver them. If someone wants to replace sendmail with postfix (or any other MTA; there are quite a few to chose from), it must be made sure that there is no change from a users point of view, i.e. the above rc.conf line should continue to work just the same way. But then again, if there is no user- visible change, then why bother to change anything at all? Those who need to run a "real" mail server that accepts remote mail (probably a small minority) can install their favourite-MTA-of-the-day from the ports collection. Oh, by the way, I would like the bike shed painted orange. Best regards Oliver -- Oliver Fromme, secnetix GmbH & Co. KG, Marktplatz 29, 85567 Grafing b. M. Handelsregister: Registergericht Muenchen, HRA 74606, Geschäftsfuehrung: secnetix Verwaltungsgesellsch. mbH, Handelsregister: Registergericht Mün- chen, HRB 125758, Geschäftsführer: Maik Bachmann, Olaf Erb, Ralf Gebhart FreeBSD-Dienstleistungen, -Produkte und mehr: http://www.secnetix.de/bsd "[...] one observation we can make here is that Python makes an excellent pseudocoding language, with the wonderful attribute that it can actually be executed." -- Bruce Eckel
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