Re: default MTA for sarge
On Mon, Jul 14, 2003 at 08:25:47PM +0200, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> Op ma 14-07-2003, om 08:49 schreef Craig Sanders:
> > On Sun, Jul 13, 2003 at 10:31:51AM +0200, Joey Hess wrote:
> > > For sarge we have two options for the default MTA in base:
> > >
> > > a. replace exim with exim4
> > > b. no MTA installed by default, add a MTA task
> >
> > why not:
> >
> > c) replace exim with postfix?
>
> Why? Do you have any compelling reasons against exim?
it's more that postfix has numerous compelling advantages. it's small, it's
fast, it's very flexible, it's very easy to configure, it's secure, it scales
beautifully from the very smallest mail systems to the very largest, and more.
> Debian has been installing exim by default for quite a while now, and it
> works well enough for most people[1]; and for those people for which it does
> not work well enough, it's easy enough to install another MTA -- we're not
> FreeBSD[2] ;-)
>
> I see no reason to change that, although exim4 as opposed to exim3 would be a
> good thing, of course.
if we're going to change from one MTA (exim3) to another (exim4), then we might
as well change to a better MTA (postfix) at the same time.
exim was only chosen as default MTA, with the proviso that the choice would be
reviewed when circumstances changed, because postfix's licence (IBM public
licence) needed some clarification at the time to be truly DFSG free. that
clarification happened years ago.
> [1] as in "for most people, the choice of MTA doesn't really matter, and exim
> is quite flexible"
true, which is why we should install the best available by default.
> [2] I have nothing against FreeBSD (in fact, my coworker is a FreeBSD
> developer), but their procedure to switch MTA's could have been made a
> little easier.
nobody's proposing that existing installations of exim3/exim4 be replaced with
postfix. the proposal is that the default MTA on new debian installations is
postfix rather than exim.
craig
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