Les Mikesell wrote:
Rahul Sundaram wrote:
OpenOffice is the particular thing I had in mind, but I suspect there
are others. I'm not talking about additional packages - this is in
reference to your comment about not deviating from upstream.
Again probably licensing reasons.
Licensing as in it is illegal to redistribute the upstream version, or
licensing as in someone arbitrarily doesn't like or agree with the license?
Well defined package licensing guidelines for Fedora. Fedora includes
only Free and open source software. Fedora clearly advertises this fact.
I made no absolute statements that no packages ever deviate. I said
that Fedora packages generally avoid patches and I stand by that.
Hence my comment that it deviates when it suits their fancy to deviate.
"fancy" would mean as the package maintainer wishes without any
consideration to the effects. They are deliberate well defined reasons
for patches as I have already clearly explained for each of the
instances cited. Nobody does the additional work of putting in patches
unnecessarily by design.
That would apply to all network services, yet none of the others are
handled this way.
What applies to sendmail doesnt apply necessarily to all network
services. Sendmail has a configuration that provides the option to
connect to localhost or network. If there are other network services
that provides this, it might be suitable to configure it by default to
connect only to the local host. We cant blindly generalize that. Many
package changes are context sensitive.
> I dont see how this is
breaking any functionality since this is a well documented
configuration change for security reasons.
Documented as in 'man sendmail' where you expect to find documentation?
It is documented directly within the configuration file.
How can removing network access from a network mail transport not break
functionality?
Sendmail is just a mail transfer agent. It can deliver mails both
locally as well for a network. In Fedora, it is configured to deliver
mail locally by default. You claimed that it is difficult to bring back
that functionality which is just not true.
> What exactly are you suggesting?
That the distribution sendmail configuration is handled entirely
differently than all the other services that have distribution-specific
and fairly systematic ways to activate them. It's not only different
from upstream, it's different from every other fedora packaging
modification in not moving the distro-specific changes under
/etc/sysconfig and providing a config program to control it easily.
Check upstream defaults before claiming that there is a difference
again. /etc/sysconfig serves a entirely different purpose. It is there
to separate changes where the configuration is otherwise directly modify
the init script which would conflict with updates using rpm. There is
no configuration program required to change this simple thing. For the
record, these are steps to configure sendmail to connect to a external
network.
1. Edit /etc/mail/sendmail.mc and either change the DAEMON_OPTIONS
line to also listen on network devices, or comment out this option
entirely using the dnl comment delimiter.
2. Install the sendmail-cf package:
yum install sendmail-cf
3. Regenerate /etc/mail/sendmail.cf:
make -C /etc/mail
Rahul
