Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
It is also reasonable for a machine to only need to deliver locally
generated mail.
It wouldn't be much fun if all machines did that.
But that doesn't change the fact that it is reasonable for some
machines. Or are you saying that because some machines need to
receive mail from the outside, that by default all machines should
be configured to receive outside mail?
I'm saying that because we know some machines will need to accept
network email - or it won't work for anyone - a general purpose
distribution should make that as easy to set up as any other service.
Why should my laptop accept
incoming mail when it does not have a valid domain name, or a fixed
IP address?
Why should any option you don't need this minute be there? Why should
the distribution work on more than laptops? Why single out sendmail here?
It would be interesting to what percentage of machines running Linux
actually need to be configured to accept incoming mail connections
from the outside.
Why is that more interesting than the percentage that have SATA drives?
Or any other thing that a general-purpose distro should handle but not
everyone wants?
> Granted, most
servers are going to need to be able to send mail someplace, but
only machines that are a mail server are going to need to accept
incoming connections, and not being able to accept incoming mail
connections by default is what you are complaining about, right?
There is a reasonable topology where a mail gateway accepts mail for a
domain and relays directly to the user's workstation for delivery. A
general purpose distribution should be able to participate in this with
every user's machine accepting his own mail.
Now, if you were arguing that Sendmail should not be the default
mail server, then I could maybe see having the default Sendmail
configuration accept incoming mail connections. Realistically, most
machines probably do not need most of the features of Sendmail.
Most machines don't need most of the features of the kernel. That
doesn't mean some arbitrary set should be broken - or that you should
have to edit obscure configurations and rebuild for fairly common
operations.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
