Re: Sorting out mail-transport-agent mess
On Thu, May 15, 2008 at 11:33:04PM +0200, Sune Vuorela wrote:
> Noticing among others this bug report
> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=322751 and observing the
> many packages depending on $MTA | mail-transport-agent with $MTA having
> values like postfix, exim, exim4, sendmail, nullmailer and probably others.
> And some packages just depending on mail-transport-agent without providing a
> preferred.
> The latter, just depending on mail-transport-agent, makes apt, at least
> currently, pick the package first in the alphabet providing m-t-a. (A bit
> ago, this was courier. now it is citadel). This definately needs fixing, but
> why not sort everything out while we are at it?
> I think something needs to be done somewhere. There is several solutions,
> among others the following:
> 1) Exim4 is currently the default installed MTA. So any package requiring a
> MTA should depend on exim4 | mail-transport-agent. Defined by policy and all
> packages should be fixed to this.
> 2) Introduce a default-mta package (currently) depending on exim4. All
> packages requiring a MTA should depend on default-mta | mail-transport-agent.
> This will have the extra advantage that we (and others like CDDs and derived
> distros) easily could swap default MTA.
I believe that 2) is the correct option, and can see no reason that it
shouldn't be implemented straight away.
--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/
slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org
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