Subject: Re: Upgrading removes sendmail, breaks system config
To: None <current-users@NetBSD.org>
From: Matthias Scheler <tron@zhadum.org.uk>
List: current-users
Date: 07/11/2007 13:00:11
On Wed, Jul 11, 2007 at 11:32:10AM +0000, Pavel Cahyna wrote:
> > Automatically switching to postfix may cause very bad surprises as well if
> > you have tweaked your sendmail config to do special things.  I think the
> 
> Is the surprise worse than not switching to postfix and leaving the mail
> system broken?

Yes, much better:

1.) If my mail server at home doesn't accept SMTP connections the mail will
    be queued on the backup mail server and not get bounced.

2.) If Postfix would however start without proper configuration it would
    bounce all lot of the e-mails instead e.g. because it wouldn't know
    that "scheler.de" is a local domain and that "matthias@scheler.de"
    should be delivered to my account.

There is no way a transition from Sendmail to Postfix can be handled
automatically. So warning the user and recommending to use the
"sendmail" package from "pkgsrc" is the best we can do.

I would actually argue that the update should automatically add
"postfix=NO" to "/etc/rc.conf" unless it was previously enabled
with "postfix=YES".

Imagine a NetBSD 3.x system which uses Exim as the MTA. The "/etc/rc.conf"
could look like this:

sendmail=NO
smmsp=NO
exim=YES

With NetBSD 4.x this might not work anymore because it will suddently
try to start Postfix.

	Kind regards

-- 
Matthias Scheler                                  http://zhadum.org.uk/