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

[Frank Shute]

On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 05:11:54PM -0200, Gonzalo Nemmi wrote:
>
> On Wednesday 28 October 2009 12:14:17 am Frank Shute wrote:
> > On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 08:45:59PM -0200, Gonzalo Nemmi wrote:
> > > On Tuesday 27 October 2009 7:31:34 pm Jerry McAllister wrote:
> >
> > [snippage]
> >
> > > > So, that leaves personal preference as the only real reason
> > > > for wanting to replace it.
> > >
> > > Let me get this straight .. that means that  every Linux distro,
> > > NetBSD, OpenBSD and DragonFlyBSD are all doing it just out of
> > > personal preference?
> >
> > I'll speculate as to the reasons:
> 
> Come on .. there was no need to speculate .. you have the whole internet 
> at your finger tips  ;)

Heh, I forgot about google ;)

> 
> > NetBSD: probably wanted something smaller footprint-wise.
> >
> > OpenBSD: wanted something more secure.
> 
> No, not really ...
> 
> OpenBSD:
> "A few months ago, I had to dive into the configuration of sendmail to 
> make a very small change. It turns out I spent almost an hour trying to 
> make sense out of a maze of files that were plain unreadable. Even the 
> slightest changes would cause me to stand a couple minutes thinking, 
> just trying to make sure I really wanted to make that change. ..."
> 
> You'll find whole thing here:
> http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20081112084647
> 
> > Dragonfly: started afresh, so could replace it without many
> > headaches.
> 
> By all means no .. not at all .. they didn't even started afresh ..
> Anyways ..
> You'll find the reasons here:
> http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/mailarchive/kernel/2007-03/msg00060.html
> 
> "Hey,
>  again and again people are complaining about why sendmail is in base 
> and why not postfix, etc. We keep saying that we do need a mail 
> delivery/transport agent, for stuff such as periodic, cron, etc.
> But that doesn't mean that we need sendmail. Actually a much simpler 
> mailer would do: one that just delivers locally (and if possible, 
> remote) and does nothing else. ... "
> 
> and here:
> http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/mailarchive/submit/2008-02/msg00000.html
> 
> "Hi,
> corecode@ announced his DragonFly mail agent in [1] as a small, simple
> and clean implementation of a mailer in the base.  The goal of dma was 
> not to replace a feature complete MTA like sendmail or postfix.  The 
> basic intention was to be able to deliver mails from cron, periodic etc 
> to local users. I enhanced dma and added remote delivery and some other 
> features needed for works-out-of-the-box and to keep users happy :)  
> The list of all features follows: ..."
> 
> Yet still, DragonFlyBSD as well as OpenBSD are in the procces of fully 
> moving to their respective mailers, unlike NetBSD which already moved 
> to Postfix.
> 
> > RedHat: poor package management made it a pain to upgrade.
> 
> That only accounts for only one distribution and I really don't know 
> what you mean with "package management" because they have a lot of 
> them ... 

I'm aiming at RPM. RedHat used to use Sendmail; I think Debian uses
Exim but uses apt. Don't know about Suse.

My main point though was that all of them had reasons to dump
Sendmail.

> 
> > FreeBSD: ?
> >
> > I can't think of a good reason why FreeBSD should get rid of it.
> >
> > Saying that, it would be neat if it was taken out of base and
> > replaced with something minimal that could cope with the demands of
> > cron and not much else. Then the user is expected to install a MTA of
> > their choice out of ports.
> >
> > That would mean less code in base and fewer security advisories.
> 
> Yup .. I fully agree with you ... I just cancelled my freebsdmall.com 
> FreeBSD suscription in order to use that money to buy OpenBSD 
> releases .. so my money gets used to finance the development of 
> OpenSMTP and other milestone technologies.
> They've earned it :)

Thanks for the informative post Gonzalo.

I like the look of the Dragonfly approach (although I don't use it).

Perhaps in FreeBSD 10* somebody might work to incorporate one or the
other (DMA or OpenSMTP) and strip out Sendmail and leave it in ports
where it belongs.

I can see that having real benefits in licensing, footprint and
usability.

> 
> > > > ////jerry
> 
> Best Regards
> Gonzalo Nemmi

Regards,

-- 

 Frank

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