Mason Loring Bliss exhibits a remarkable gift for understatement:

> The idea of switching to using something other than sendmail as NetBSD's
> main mailer has been lobbed about lately. I, personally, think that it
> would be better to stick with sendmail, for a number of more or less valid
> reasons.
> .....
> continuing to use sendmail as our primary mailer, and using the newer
> versions of sendmail that make it easier for sites to be "good citizens"
> through the automatic denial of relaying, easy use of the rbl, etc.,
> simply strikes me as being remarkably worthwhile.
> 
> Thoughts?

Yeah, I have a thought: You're right.  Unfortunately, some people
involved in the NetBSD project should abandon engineering and persue
full-time political careers --- they'd do less harm that way.  I don't
give a damn about ideological purity: I use NetBSD because it's the
most solid, secure, reliable system I can get, and comes with most of
the solid, standard tools I need.  If NetBSD punts sendmail, 95% of
system administrators with real-world issues to worry about will
respond in one of two ways: "to hell with this crap, I'm going with
{linux | freeBSD | openBSD} (about 80%) or muttering under their
breath and manually installing sendmail (the rest).  Really, isn't it
*enough* of an ideologically motivated pain in the ass that I have to
manually install perl, emacs, bash and tcsh every time I install a new
NetBSD box before I can get any work done?

Answering engineering questions with political reasoning produces
kruft like the US Gov't encryption policy or the mythical pi = 3
legislation in Indiana.  Let's please answer engineering questions
with *engineering* reasoning.  Yeah, there should probably be a
/usr/doc/licenses file detailing which licenses apply to what, but
beyond that, there's not a substantive issue here.  (And in the
'put your money where your mouth is' department, yes, I will
volunteer to help create such a file.)

---Alex

Carl Alexander
------------- MIT (where Alex hangs out):
xela@mit.edu      Course VI (sometime special student)    SIPB (prospective)
                  Mitgaard ("honorary mold")    MITSFS    LSC (night worker)
                  http://www.mit.edu/~xela
------------- Work (where they call me "Carl"):
carl@terc.edu     System Administrator & User Services Manager, TERC
                  http://www.terc.edu