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

[Lars Eighner]

On Tue, 27 Oct 2009, Chris Rees wrote:

> 2009/10/27 Lars Eighner <luvbeastie at larseighner.com>:
>> On Tue, 27 Oct 2009, Chris Rees wrote:
>>
>>> 2009/10/27 Lars Eighner <luvbeastie at larseighner.com>:
>>>>
>>>> On Tue, 27 Oct 2009, Jonathan McKeown wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> On Monday 26 October 2009 21:29:27 Yuri wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> It's in /usr/sbin/sendmail.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> How many people actually use it? Very few.
>>>>>> Why isn't it moved to ports?
>>>>>
>>>>> What is this anti-sendmail obsession people have?
>>>>
>>>> The configuration is opaque, to put it kindly.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Are you talking about sendmail.m4 or sendmail.cf? Because we stopped
>>> editing sendmail.cf by hand years ago.....
>>
>> Then what are "we" using to edit sendmail.cf?  The man page doesn't seem to
>> be et up with verbosity on the subject.
>>
>> Let me guess: a gnome GUI?
>>
>
> You guessed wrong.
>
> We use m4, which cuts out most of the crap that you had to write into
> sendmail.cf. You write sendmail.mc and compile it. Sendmail.mc on my
> system is less than 50 lines long, including comments.
>
> http://www.sendmail.org/m4/intro.html

That's as poorly documented and incomprehensible as .cf by hand.  What is
your interest in sendmail?  Are you connected with it in someway?  Surely,
yours could not be the opinion of someone who doesn't get a piece of
O'Reilly's royalties.  It's the same old crap, give the software away, sell
the documentation.

-- 
Lars Eighner
http://www.larseighner.com/index.html
8800 N IH35 APT 1191 AUSTIN TX 78753-5266