Re: sendmail, deliver and procmail

[Rob Leslie <rob@mars.org>]

> Now that sendmail is already so much easier to configure, some
> questions/suggestions:
> 
> Does sendmail have to depend on deliver? Sendmail comes with its own
> mail.local to deliver to a local mailbox. Wouldn't it be sufficient to
> use this as a default local mailer?

Sendmail can't use its own mail.local because:

  (1) The standard version does not easily port to Linux, and
  (2) The Linux version does not do the proper Debian-style mailbox locking.

We may eventually want to do a better port of the original version, or rewrite
mail.local specifically for Debian, or forget the whole thing and use deliver
as a drop-in replacement instead. (Deliver was, in fact, designed to do this
for systems lacking a mail.local, and to my knowledge it is also used as the
standard local delivery agent for Slackware.)

> To add more luxury, it would be nice if sendmailconfig can detect if
> deliver and/or procmail are available and offer those as an
> alternative local mailer to use. Sendmail can suggest or recommend one
> r both (where my favourite is procmail - but that is a matter of
> taste). 

I do indeed want to make the choice of local delivery agent more flexible, but
I didn't have time to do this for 1.1. Sorry.

-- 
Robert Leslie
rob@mars.org