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

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:29:27 -0700, Yuri <yuri at rawbw.com> wrote:
> It's in /usr/sbin/sendmail.
>
> How many people actually use it? Very few.
> Why isn't it moved to ports?

This questions comes up very often.  You can find lots of reasons in one
of the older threads about Sendmail, e.g. at:

  http://groups.google.com/group/fa.freebsd.stable/msg/166040f2d75547bc
  http://groups.google.com/group/mailing.freebsd.chat/msg/a9e850da1dba3fc2
  http://groups.google.com/group/comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc/msg/39f14b08bb752ca7
  http://groups.google.com/group/mailing.freebsd.current/msg/3b73a04c9f5e6a19

Sendmail is _already_ part of the ports/ BTW, and it supports many knobs
to build custom versions of Sendmail with or without IPv6, milter, NIS,
SASL, TLS or LDAP support, and so on:

  keramida at kobe:/usr/ports/mail$ more sendmail/Makefile
  [...]
  # Options to define Features:
  # SENDMAIL_WITHOUT_IPV6=yes
  # SENDMAIL_WITHOUT_MILTER=yes
  # SENDMAIL_WITHOUT_NIS=yes
  [...]