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

[Oliver Fromme]

Lowell Gilbert wrote:
 > Gonzalo Nemmi <gnemmi at gmail.com> writes:
 > > On Tuesday 27 October 2009 7:22:22 pm Lowell Gilbert wrote:
 > > > Gonzalo Nemmi <gnemmi at gmail.com> writes:
 > > > > Well .. someday UFS will be replaced by ZFS ..

I don't see a reason why UFS should be removed anytime soon.
If that happens, then that would be in a very distant future
when nobody is using UFS anymore (and I'm not talking about
FreeBSD only).

 > > And what would you say ... removing perl was more daunting that 
 > > replacing Senmail? Honest question.
 > 
 > Perl was harder.  No question.

*Replacing* sendmail is completely different from *removing*
perl, both technically and historically.

 > I would actually be just as happy to see *no* MTA in the base system,
 > but the installer work to keep that from violating the Principle Of
 > Least Astonishment is even more tricky than replacing sendmail with
 > something else.

There needs to be at least an LDA in the base system,
unless you don't care about cron jobs and other things
working correctly.  I think many users *do* care.

It doesn't have to be a fully-featured MTA, though, but at
least it should be capable of queueing, remote delivery,
support for aliases, forwarding and a few other things.

Sendmail currently does all of that on FreeBSD out of the
box with zero configuration efforts, just one line in
rc.conf (sendmail_enable="NO") which will start up the
queue daemon, listen for local mails and deliver them.

If someone wants to replace sendmail with postfix (or any
other MTA; there are quite a few to chose from), it must
be made sure that there is no change from a users point of
view, i.e. the above rc.conf line should continue to work
just the same way.  But then again, if there is no user-
visible change, then why bother to change anything at all?
Those who need to run a "real" mail server that accepts
remote mail (probably a small minority) can install their
favourite-MTA-of-the-day from the ports collection.

Oh, by the way, I would like the bike shed painted orange.

Best regards
   Oliver

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