Re: Why not making /sbin/sendmail a mantadory component for mail operation?
Henrique de Moraes Holschuh <hmh@debian.org> writes:
> On Wed, 17 May 2006, Goswin von Brederlow wrote:
>> which results in "smtphost bugs.debian.org" in the conffile. Maybe the
>> default to the MTA question could be "N" instead.
>
> An open outgoing port 25 is commonly blocked by default anywhere you have
> non-incompetent network management, unless you are on the business of
> selling full internet uplinks for server hosting, or you do business with
> spammers.
You mean connection from random user ports to destination port 25?
If you are at a place where that is the case then you should have an
IT team or admin that will tell you what smtp host to use or even
install your system.
> Sometimes I feel we are abandoning the true spirit of an Unix system. If
> Debian made sure to always have a local MTA that is properly configured to
> send email (and it can be a simple SMTP with no queue thing, too. It can
> work just as well and can be as safe as a full-blown MTA, the drawback is
> that the user has to wait for the email to be delivered to a queueing MTA
> before the sendmail command returns), everything could be made to just work.
And how would that be any simpler than setting an smtp server for
reportbug? Setting up a fully usable MTA is more difficult than having
reportbug connect directly to bugs.d.o.
> What exactly is the problem with making a local MTA absolutely mandatory,
> (as in anything that sends email either recommends or depends on
> mail-transport-agent)?
>
> Of course, at the same time we would have to make sure stuff like nbsmtp,
> nullmailer, esmtp-run or ssmtp is trivially easy to install, and point our
> users to those packages so that they know the possiblity exists. IMHO we
> really ought to leverage d-i to bluntly ask the user if he wants a
> full-blown MTA or just a SMTP relay (obviously by using easier terms, like a
> "Advanced outgoing mail service" (i.e. exim) task, which if not selected,
> gives you nullmailer or somesuch.
That would mean another service on the system that might get
compromised or misused. I'm perfectly fine with having mail only
delivered internaly or not at all for my chroots but I still want to
be able to report bugs with the right dependency informations. If you
force the use of an MTA then I would have to save the bug reports to a
file and mail them manualy from outside the chroot every time I get a
bug. Much less usable.
MfG
Goswin
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