Re: Why isn't Sendmail standard (was: make anacron a base package)
> This is incorrect. /usr/doc/sendmail/cf.README.gz is your friend. I
(sorry for the aol) ok, someone realizes this at least ;) my mail system
isn't nearly so esoteric as yours, but it has a nonstandard feature
nonetheless: i have a near-full-time net connection, but a dynamic ip, so i
don't receive mail on my system. that's not a problem: all the debian
sendmailconfigs have an option for local mail only, which is mostly what i
want; but i'd also like to be able to send mail remotely, and pretend that
my smarthost is local for purposes of sending mail to it, because it's
convenient. i initially used exim because it was standard and claimed to be
"easily configurable". when i wanted to do this *simple* thing, i had no
choice but to filter through a very very long document about everything from
why exim is good to the tiniest details of its queue-processing algorithm,
which (presumably) included the significant modifications i'd need to make
to various files to get it done. (i later discovered that it requires the
changing of one line in the config file and the addition of one line in
another lookup file). i gave up before i finished, and installed sendmail,
and looked through the cf.README.gz for five minutes. right in there was a
lesson on basics of m4 for configuration, and a list of things you could
define to make features happen before re-running sendmailconfig to make the
proper files which contain more cryptic (but more flexible) info. (even
those, by the way, are relatively easy to understand after five minutes on
the telephone with someone who already knows it. there are very simple
patterns, they're just not very pretty.) a glance down the feature list
brought me to "LUSER_RELAY", which was exactly what i wanted. the warning
about where it had to be was quite clear, and i had no difficulties
whatsoever. i even discovered exactly how to do it in sendmail.cf minutes
later, by examining the diffs (for the record, it's one of the C lines and
one of the K lines; there's a comment generated by the m4 template that
implements it, even). if sendmail's -obscure- features are that
easy to set up, it's amazing that the more common features are considered
difficult.
and sendmail is powerful. until later, when a developer pointed out on this
list that there's a way to do a luser_relay in exim, i was pretty sure it
didn't exist (actually, i was dubious that even sendmail had such a
rarely-used thing, but i wasn't surprised when i found out). so i reiterate,
why do we use exim as a standard (and smail before that)? i'm not
necessarily challenging it, i'd just like to know. clearly the decision was
made long ago, and i suspect there must be a really good reason for such a
major deviation from such a widely-used standard.
--p.
"Reasoning is partly insane" --Rush, "Anagram (for Mongo)"
PGP 5.0 key (0xE024447449) at http://cif.rochester.edu/~phouchg/pgpkey.txt
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