Sendmail X port

[Lowell Gilbert]

Brett Glass <brett at lariat.net> writes:

> I don't see Sendmail X available as a port or package. I'm interested in trying
> this version because it's the first to eliminate the horribly cryptic system of
> m4 macros, "classes", and address parsing rules that configured earlier versions.
> Is there a reason why it's not available as a package or port for FreeBSD?

Well, it's still missing a lot of functionality that you need in a
FreeBSD system (such as the ability to actually deliver or submit
messages), so it's more of a challenge to port properly than one would
think.  That's probably why it's still considered alpha software.

It builds easily enough, though.  And the configuration sure is a lot
simpler (at the expense of some very powerful capabilities that were
very rarely used).  So it's not as though there is some reason
somebody is trying to keep it *out* of the ports system.

I figure it shouldn't be too hard to assemble a reasonably working
port for it.  You could use existing ports to provide the missing
functionality; mail/mini_sendmail for submission and maybe procmail
would be able to handle delivery.  Then you need to add a bunch of
users and groups for the individual daemons to run as.  I'm not sure
how you best do that when there isn't really a standard for the
UID/GID values to use, but brute force would probably work okay for
alpha-quality software.

Be well.
-- 
Lowell Gilbert, embedded/networking software engineer, Boston area
		http://be-well.ilk.org/~lowell/