Why is sendmail is part of the system and not a package?

[pete wright]

On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 5:16 PM, Lars Eighner
<luvbeastie at larseighner.com> wrote:

>> You guessed wrong.
>>
>> We use m4, which cuts out most of the crap that you had to write into
>> sendmail.cf. You write sendmail.mc and compile it. Sendmail.mc on my
>> system is less than 50 lines long, including comments.
>>
>> http://www.sendmail.org/m4/intro.html
>
> That's as poorly documented and incomprehensible as .cf by hand.  What is
> your interest in sendmail?  Are you connected with it in someway?  Surely,
> yours could not be the opinion of someone who doesn't get a piece of
> O'Reilly's royalties.  It's the same old crap, give the software away, sell
> the documentation.
>

well shit man - Eric's actually a super nice guy and has made some
major contributions to computing so I reckon he deserves *some*
respect for the work he's done on sendmail.

and frankly I find it easier to setup a SMART_HOST in my .m4 and dist
out my resulting configs to my servers in my production clusters.  I
also have the added benefit that i know sendmail is being tracked as
part of the base system so it makes it easier for me to monitor
patches w/o having to track ports.

For more complex systems (my relay for example) - sure I use postfix,
and freebsd makes this quite easy to do as well.  if you don't want to
use sendmail on your machines it's easy - just don't use it.

-pete


-- 
pete wright
www.nycbug.org