confusion setting up local email delivery, a war story

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

I wished to set up a Fedora 23 notebook to pick up email via fetchmail.  A 
problem I'd solved long ago on other distros and releases.

fetchmail failed because it tried to use SMTP with localhost to do the
local delivery and nobody was listening for SMTP.  That got removed
from the default install perhaps sometime around Fedora 20.

So I installed postfix.  That didn't work.  I may have done some other
things in desperation -- I was actually directing my user to do the
sysadmining via intermittent email between different cities.  This was a
month ago so my memory is foggy.

I picked up the problem yesterday, with direct access to the notebook.
I'm not really familiar with the new way logging is handled (journald)
so it took me a while to figure out that there was useful information
there. (journalctl is a very awkward tool in my hands.)  I finally
figured out that I needed to "process" the aliases file (/etc/aliases).

The comments in the file itself say to run the newaliases command.
There was no such command.  But there was newaliases.postfix.  Running
that didn't work: it tried to read something (what?) from standard in.

I took a wild guess that the program looked at the name with which it
was invoked behaved accordingly.  So I created a symlink
~/bin/newaliases to /usr/bin/newaliases.postfix and invoked that.  Success!

Amusing fact: "man newaliases.postfix" displays a manpage (good!) that
doesn't mention newaliases.postfix (bad!).

Why was there no /usr/bin/newaliases?  Perhaps in desperation I had gotten 
the user to install and remove different MTAs (sendmail, esmtp?) and the 
"preferences" system got lost.  This seems unfortunate.  (Although the 
preferences system is surely a Good Thing, it is something else I've not 
yet understood.)

If postfix's /usr/bin/newaliases-and-whatever-else cares about the
name under which it is invoked, it should log an error for an
unexpected name.  /usr/bin/newaliases.postfix has no other hard links
on my system.