Brett Lymn wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 10, 2006 at 06:11:54PM +0200, Johnny Billquist wrote:
> 
>>So I still stand by the reasoning that if you want a mail daemon, you 
>>should install it yourself, you cannot depend on what's in base.
> 
> There is a MTA in base, it may not be the one that you are used to or
> like but there is one there.  As was the case before, you are free to
> install whatever MTA you like then only difference now is that the
> people who want sendmail fall into this group whereas before they didn't.

The difference is larger than you try to make it look here.

>>So, why have any?
> 
> Basically, your position is that the MTA must be sendmail or nothing.

No, you are missing the point.
Replacing one tool with another will cause headaches for people who used 
to use the old one. And we're talking about something that have been in 
there since the start of NetBSD.

If we feel free to switch tools depending on the current trends or 
views, we are in effect creating a system where you cannot rely on the 
base system at all to have a specific environment.
That in turn leads to the conclusion that you'd better install anything 
you want to depend on yourself, and not trust base, because base is a 
moving target.

That is the point I'm trying to make, and people can feel as insulted as 
they want. My intention is not to insult anyone, but to question the 
wiseness of starting to adapt to whatever the current trend is.
This goes in the same vein as replacing sh with bash, setting bash as 
the default shell for root and a number of similar issues that I think 
I've seen starting to surface.
And also, in my view, this feels like an attempt to start mimicking 
Linux. Why, the next step might be to not only drop the daemon logo, but 
to drop the "BSD" moniker totally.
Is this even a BSD system in the future, or are we driving towards Linux 
or SysV?
All people might not think that csh is the greatest shell on earth, and 
so on for a number of different tools and things, but what defines BSD? 
Is it just a name, or is it also a view on the system, and a history 
behind why things are the way they are, and a recognition that some 
people think this is better?
Do it have to be what the majority in the world currently thinks is hip?

Sorry if I'm rambling, and throwing a bunch of silly questions around, 
and I'm also sorry if I offend people. Like I said, I'm not out to 
offend anyone, but I'd like to put the finger on issues that I might 
have, that I may not agree fully with the decisions taken.

And I do think there is a point in questioning what else might be 
dropped in the future, because someone might actually depend on that 
subsystem as well, and might be bitten. I'm aware that it's hard to tell 
what the future will be in detail, but people have opinions on which 
direction things should move.

> A lot of people don't care about what the MTA is as long as the mail
> gets delivered.  There is still an expectation on a unix system that
> there will be an operational MTA for programs to use, -current has a
> MTA to do this job.

If you don't care about the MTA, you'll probably only do mail locally 
anyway, in which case a full-blown MTA is overkill. Otherwise most 
people are doing changes to the configuration, which means they both 
care about the MTA, and also might not have such an easy time to just 
change it.

	Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt@update.uu.se           ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol