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

[Lars Eighner]

On Tue, 27 Oct 2009, pete wright wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 5:16 PM, Lars Eighner
> <luvbeastie at larseighner.com> wrote:
>
>>> 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.

> well shit man - Eric's actually a super nice guy and has made some
> major contributions to computing so I reckon he deserves *some*
> respect for the work he's done on sendmail.

Evidently by making it necessary to learn yet another scripting language
to configure it.  Other than personal profit I cannot see why people are
clinging like grim death to something this fubar.  Really, let's go past
this one more time:

"Sure, sendmail.cf is hard to work with so the solution is you learn m4!"

Did you look at the link he offered?  How helpful is that?

Beside which, m4 is a PORT.  So if sendmail is not configurable without a
port, why isn't it a port?

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