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

[Lowell Gilbert]

I probably should move this bikeshed to freebsd-chat...

Gonzalo Nemmi <gnemmi at gmail.com> writes:

> On Tuesday 27 October 2009 6:20:35 pm Frank Shute wrote:
>> On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 09:24:58PM +0200, Giorgos Keramidas wrote:
>> I can imagine that a lot of people do use sendmail - it's documented
>> in the handbook for starters. If it was taken out and replaced with
>> another MTA then there would be complaints that sendmail has been
>> taken out or "replacement MTA" is the "wrong one".
>
> Well .. someday UFS will be replaced by ZFS ..

Maybe.  That's still quite a way out, and who knows what else will come
along in the meantime?  

>                                             .. and one day Perl just 
> dissapeard from base .. yet the worl kept turning, and even better .. 
> no one got hurt ;)

I remember quite a bit of pain.  It was worth it, because maintaining
perl in the base was causing pain on an ongoing basis, but it was a 
problem for users in a number of different ways.

> in the other hand, those not complaining, will probably be really 
> happy .. so ...

So you keep saying, but I don't think there's any solid evidence.  Your
experience is one thing, but although I consider myself a postfix user,
I have machines that run sendmail because it just worked for their
purpose with no configuration at all.

> Doesn't ZFS mean that you have to reconfigure (or even reinstall) your 
> system?

No.  Your old configuration works just fine if you still want to keep
using it.  You won't get the advantages of ZFS, but having it in FreeBSD
didn't bre

-- 
Lowell Gilbert, embedded/networking software engineer, Boston area
		http://be-well.ilk.org/~lowell/