Re: Replacing Postfix

[Alistair Crooks <agc%pkgsrc.org@localhost>]

On Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 07:55:46PM +0200, Jukka Ruohonen wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 05:21:43PM +0100, Alistair Crooks wrote:
> > I do wonder if the time has come to move to a small mini_sendmail STYLE
> > MTA by default, with anything meatier coming from pkgsrc.
> 
> Why?
> 
> I have to wonder about this ping-pong -style brainstorming. We just had a
> successful GSOC project to implement a SASL client library with the partial
> motivation to integrate it with Postfix.[1] There is a parallel to the
> situation with mdocml, and the work put forward to support -Tps/-Tpdf.

Thanks - I was aware of the SASL GSoC implementation - I was the
co-mentor of the project, and I also imported the code into the tree. 
It hasn't been hooked into the build yet, as I have no way of testing
it easily.  I don't see there are any parallels with groff/mdocml, but
maybe that's just me.

I also apologise for the "ping pong -style brainstorming", even if I
have absolutely NFI what you mean.  We used to have 2 MTAs in our
tree, and that has been reduced to 1, a correct decision IMO.  It's
not as if we have ever been too light on the MTA front.  Not sure
where the ping-pong is coming from here.

But, to explain further - most setups do not need or want a heavyweight
MTA.  Heavyweight?

  492 postfix   85    0    19M 2440K kqueue     0:00  0.00%  0.00% qmgr
  508 postfix   85    0    19M 2412K kqueue     0:00  0.00%  0.00% pickup
  500 root      85    0    19M 2408K kqueue     0:00  0.00%  0.00% master

on a -current amd64 platform - it's a VM - not sure I can justify the
/usr/libexec/postfix directory and its contents.  In particular, all I
want from an MTA is a way to get email out to where it's going. This is
where "email" is defined as any /etc/{daily,weekly,monthly} output.

Now don't get me wrong - I love postfix, and have been using it for ages.
But I use it on machines where I want to send and receive mail. I don't
usually want or need it on every single box.

Regards,
Alistair