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

[Lars Eighner]

On Fri, 30 Oct 2009, Ian Smith wrote:

> > Why does sendmail call up the internet during boot?  If it needs to know who
> > it is, why can't it look in hosts?
>
> See the section: WHO AM I? in /usr/src/contrib/sendmail/cf/README
> (assuming you haven't deleted the documentation from your system)

Or did not install the src.  WHO AM I? doesn't answer the question of how to
turn off calling up the internet on every boot.

But let's see how far we can get in the README

          divert(0)

Evidently doesn't really matter.

          VERSIONID(`<SCCS or RCS version id>')

Evidently doesn't really matter.

          OSTYPE(`hpux9')dnl

You must specify an OSTYPE to properly configure things such as the
pathname of the help and status files, the flags needed for the local
mailer, and other important things.  If you omit it, you will get an
error when you try to build the configuration.  Look at the ostype
directory for the list of known operating system types.

     Okay, let's look in ostype directory: freebsd4, freebsd5, freebsd6.
But wait! on freshly cvsupped source for 7.2-p4, freebsd7 is not a
recognized ostype according to the ostype directory.  It says the
configuration won't build without.

No point in going on from here if my ostype doesn't exist.


And it looks like if I could get past here, I'd be back editing the source
every time I upgraded the system because for some reason, after all these
years, there cannot be a plain English configuration file in /etc such every
other service has managed to come up with.


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