RFC: Sendmail deprecation ?

[Matthew Seaman]

On 13/12/2017 00:42, Don Lewis wrote:
> On 12 Dec, Daniel Eischen wrote:
>>
>>> On Dec 11, 2017, at 7:11 PM, Conrad Meyer <cem at freebsd.org> wrote:
> 
>>> mail/sendmail has been available as a port since 2000.
>>
>> But that port reportedly doesn't have the FreeBSD configuration files
>> that we have in base.  You'd be pushing the burden of maintaining them
>> onto the ports maintainer, making sure they work on all supported
>> branches; they may not want that responsibility.
> 
> I haven't played with the port, but it may well be looking for the
> existing config files in /etc and not look in ${LOCALBASE}/etc at all.
> If that is the case, then if you modify the port to look in
> ${LOCALBASE}/etc, you'll break things for everybody who currently uses
> the port.  If you try to limit that problem by having the port look at
> ${LOCALBASE}/etc only for FreeBSD versions where sendmail is removed
> from base, it complicates the port and the transition will still be
> messy for anyone who is using the binary packages that we distribute.

I don't use sendmail for my principle MTA any more, but I used to run
the ports version of sendmail with the standard FreeBSD sendmail config
bits in /etc/mail and the rc scripts from /etc/rc.d, since those aren't
in the ports version yet.

As I recall, it took about two variables in /etc/rc.conf to make that
setup use the .mc library files installed by the port to build the
sendmail config.  To run everything out of ${LOCALBASE}/etc/mail, the
port basically needs to take four files from the base system:
/etc/rc.d/sendmail, /etc/mail/freebsd.mc, /etc/mail/freebsd.submit.mc
and /etc/mail/Makefile.  These can be copied into the port with minor
changes, plus possibly with the addition one or two sample database
files.  All that can be installed conditionally on FreeBSD versions
where the base sendmail has been removed, something that's quite common
in the ports, and will not add much in the way of complexity to what is
already a very complex port.

All in all, not really an impediment to removing sendmail from base.

	Cheers,

	Matthew



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