Why is sendmail in the core of FreeBSD?

[Jona Joachim]

On Sat, 22 Sep 2007 19:30:59 +0300
"Abdullah Ibn Hamad Al-Marri" <almarrie at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 9/22/07, Wojciech Puchar <wojtek at wojtek.tensor.gdynia.pl> wrote:
> > >> i personally use only sendmail.
> > >>
> > >
> > > Yep... if it works, don't 'fix' it.
> > >
> > same with any other things :)
> 
> I would prefer to have postfix vs sendmail since it built with
> security in mind

spaceman% telnet mx1.freebsd.org 25
Trying 2001:4f8:fff6::34...
telnet: connect to address 2001:4f8:fff6::34: No route to host
Trying 69.147.83.52...
Connected to mx1.freebsd.org.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 mx1.freebsd.org ESMTP Postfix (Postfix Rules!)

;)
I prefer Postfix over Sendmail anytime but there are good reasons why
Sendmail is in the base system and Postfix isn't.
Postfix depends on PCRE which is not part of the base system. So you
would have to include that one, too. Perhaps you can build Postfix
without PCRE but I'm not sure.
The Sendmail source code is around 1.5MB whereas Postfix is around
2.8MB. That's not a big difference but still, the size of a CD is
limited. The release engineering team would have to figure out if that
could be a problem.
Then there are a lot of sysadmins which have been using Sendmail for
years and don't want to switch. After all Sendmail is one of the most
common MTAs on the Internet.
Furthermore Sendmail was initially developed at UC Berkeley. It's not
very common to kick BSD software from a BSD tree to replace it with
non-BSD software.
Finally, if you want Postfix it's very easy to install it from ports
and replace Sendmail.

Best regards,
Jona