On Sat, 2003-03-29 at 09:06, Nicolas Kratz wrote: > Following the Principle of Least Astonishment, the alternatives system > should not be used to make decisions on what daemons to start. How is that the least astonishment? What you're suggesting would easily allow the sendmail program and the MTA to get out of sync. Having a different sendmail program than MTA *easily* leads to lost mail, because the queue isn't processed. Or because mailers use different queue formats. I'd be very astonished, and I think most everyone would be, if changing /etc/default/mailer (or whatever) caused mail to be lost. If you go the /etc/default/mailer route, then sendmail, mailq, etc. have to be replaced with scripts that check the default mailer and execute the appropriate one. In order to work with your corner case below, those scripts would need to be conffiles in /etc to allow the admin to set them up differently. That sounds quite like alternatives. > I can > also see corner cases where one MTA is supposed to start at boot, but > another one has to provide the sendmail functionality. I can see much config file editing for people with those corner cases. They have to ensure queues don't run in to each other, that both queues get delivered, etc. Editing a init.d file to remove the alternatives check isn't that bad.
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