Default MTA for Fedora 7

Thomas M Steenholdt tmus at tmus.dk
Mon Feb 5 20:39:42 UTC 2007


Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Monday 05 February 2007 12:52, Ralf Ertzinger wrote:
>>> Are we really changing the default MTA just because of a cock-up in
>>> resolving dependencies?
>> No.
>> We change it because sendmail sucks and needs to die.
> 
> No, we haven't _changed_ anything.  We let yum decide what dep to satisfy 
> smtpdaemon dependencies of mdadm and fetchmail, which happened to be in the 
> Desktop spin that we did for Test 1.  We have not made any statement or 
> decision about what might be the "default" MTA should a user actually ask for 
> an MTA.  In fact, in the Desktop installer, there is NO CHOICE for an MTA on 
> purpose.
> 
> Discussions like what are happening here is exactly why I don't want to choose 
> a default one.  I'd much rather the Mail Server grouped marked every MTA 
> as 'optional' and the end user has to make a choice.  If no choice is made, 
> than the dependency resolver will make a choice, and right now, exim wins 
> because it wins in a sort of all that provide smtpdaemon (shortest name).  If 
> somebody packages up the 'aa' package that provides smtpdaemon and plays with 
> alternatives right, 'aa' would win, again because of the sort.
> 
> I'm tired of this argument, let no mailer be default, other than what wins 
> progamatically by dep resolution.
> 
> 

I'm not going to debate which mailer is best, but I have to say this... 
Knowing that exim will win a dependency race for for /usr/sbin/sendmail, 
including the package on the media and installing it by default (even if 
it's to satisfy a dep.), comes very very close to being a conscious 
decision.

/Thomas




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