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Re: Questions regarding lsb-invalid-mta



> According to that spec, any return value greater than 0 is an error 
> condition.  So lsb-invalid-mta does actually conform to the spec it's 
> referencing.

Ah, missed that part of the spec. I still disagree that lsb-invalid-mta
conforms to it though, since it doesn't actually implement anything the
spec describes.

> We package a number of "full" MTAs, such as Exim, Sendmail, and Postfix, 
> as well as a number of "stripped-down" MTAs such as ssmtp.  As they all 
> provide the "sendmail" command-line utility, they all conflict with each 
> other.  (As you'd probably expect; how many MTAs do you really need 
> installed on a single system?)  The default MTA is Exim.
> 
> All of our MTAs Provide: the virtual package "mail-transport-agent", so 
> you can get a complete list with apt:

Okay. So, Debian considers an MTA to consist of both a server and client
component. This seems like a sensible enough definition. If we want to
provide /usr/sbin/sendmail without installing an entire MTA then, I
guess we have two options:

1) Install the entire MTA, but leave the server component unconfigured
(assuming this is even possible). Enabling the server component later
could be done using dpkg-reconfigure.

2) Make a new package available which provides only /usr/sbin/sendmail,
but not "mail-transport-agent" (i.e. installs no server). In this case,
I guess all packages providing mail-transport-agent would need to
replace this package.

Perhaps I've missed something. Thoughts?


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