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Re: why is sendmail the adopted mta?


From: Michel Talon <talon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 02 Jan 2005 18:49:52 +0100

Simon 'corecode' Schubert wrote:


we're not there yet. not even half way; for that we'd need to package the base system which is something that is highly controversial, too.

Packaging part of the base system and packaging the totality of the base system are two different things. I agree that making packages for every small thing is stupid. However there are a couple of notoriously controversial software which could very well be packaged separately.
Perl and Bind8 were obviously in this category, note that FreeBSD-5
packages them separately now, or have replaced Bind8 by Bind9 which is far less controversial. Sendmail is obviously in this category.
Yes for sure sendmail recommends itself to be the standard MTA because
it is of Berkely origin, and it has been very useful in the past.
However it has always been a security hazard, and continues doing so, even in the recent past. It has enormous configurability which nowadays
serve no useful purpose since all sort of strange addressing schemes,
Bitnet, Decnet, etc. have disappeared. So you are now paying the price of this configurability in terms of configuration difficulties,
without any ensuing utility whatsoever.





Why do I bring this up?
Because I see no good reason to keep using sendmail ... and because I
believe that dragonflybsd is doing a great work adopting and creating
new software solutions that look better than the existing ones....
pf
open ntpd
dragonfly itself .. when comparing to freebsd.


And this is a very cogent argument.



as you might see no ``good'' reason, there might be hundreds of people seeing a very good reason to keep it.


Those hundred people are the same that will never convert to Dragonflybsd nor to FreeBSD-5, because they are convinced that only FreeBSD-4 has the one true stability, that sendmail has the only true features and so on. Precisely dragonflybsd is an effort in a non conventional direction, as far as i understand, so arguments based
on inertia are not very relevant here.



i don't use sendmail, too. i'm using postfix, from ports, and i'm happy with it. you got the choice.



As has been repeated many times, installing the postfix port doesn't remove the sendmail stuff, the sendmail manpages that hide the postfix ones, etc. Of course someone diligent enough can remove all that stuff by hand, but as soon as a system becomes widely used, this sort of thing becomes "unprofessional". Do you imagine doing that on a pool of 100 machines?




--
Michel Talon




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