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

[Gonzalo Nemmi]

On Tuesday 27 October 2009 7:32:14 am b. f. wrote:
> >It's in /usr/sbin/sendmail.
> >
> >How many people actually use it? Very few.
> >Why isn't it moved to ports?
>
> Obviously, not everyone wants or needs sendmail in the base system.
> But quite a few people do use it, and many FreeBSD developers are
> happy with the status quo, so it is unlikely that sendmail will be
> removed soon.  But there's nothing to prevent you from disabling it
> in rc.conf(5):

Or from switching to other BSDs in which the last word over an issue 
stands in the hands of reason .. and not in the hands of status quo ... 
which, by the way, never took any science a single step forwar, and on 
the contrary ... did everything it could to stop it ... because 
otherwise, there would be no status quo anymore or it will fall in the 
hands of others.

> sendmail_enable="NONE"
>
> and replacing it's administrative use with local logs in
> periodic.conf(5), by adding, for example:
>
> daily_output="/var/log/daily.log"
> daily_clean_hoststat_enable="NO"
> daily_status_mailq_enable="NO"
> daily_status_include_submit_mailq="NO"
> daily_status_mail_rejects_enable="NO"
> daily_queuerun_enable="NO"
> daily_submit_queuerun="NO"
> daily_status_security_output="/var/log/daily.log"
> weekly_output="/var/log/weekly.log"
> monthly_output="/var/log/monthly.log"
>
> . (Or you can use another MTA instead.)  You can also go one step
> farther: if you have the system sources available, you can rip
> sendmail out of the base system and avoid building and installing it
> again by using either
>
> WITHOUT_SENDMAIL=yes
>
> or
>
> WITHOUT_MAIL=yes
>
> in src.conf(5), then running 'make delete-old' and 'make
> delete-old-libs' in /usr/src, and finally removing any leftover
> associated files by hand. (find(1) can be used with  the appropriate
> flags to check for stale files or empty directories in the base
> system directories immediately after a fresh install in order to help
> locate such leftover files.  A warning: use of the more drastic
> WITHOUT_MAIL option can remove /usr/bin/fmt, which is used
> unconditionally by some src targets.  So you may need to install fmt
> by hand, or patch the src Makefiles so that fmt isn't used.)  All
> this doesn't take very long, and doesn't need to be done all that
> often on an existing system, so the presence of sendmail in the base
> system shouldn't worry you too much, even if you don't want to use it
> on your system(s).
>
> b.
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Best Regards
Gonzalo Nemmi