smail

[Barak Pearlmutter <bap@cs.unm.edu>]

As you probably know, smail is removed from potato due to an RC bug.
Said bug is present on the ALPHA architecture only.  (Even there it is
manifested only when running smail from inetd, which is not the
recommended procedure - so I personally would classify it as "normal"
rather than "grave".)

Anyway, since smail used to be the recommended MTA, the majority of
the stable user base probably uses it.  If i386 smail isn't included
when potato releases, literally millions of boxes will be rather
forcibly transitioned to a new MTA.

For developers and testers this isn't a big deal because they're
expecting things like that, and besides for obvious reasons they're
not generally upgrading hosts that handle mail.  But for lots of user
sites this will be a serious problem.  Especially for places that have
actually configured the mailer, set up mailing lists in
/etc/smail/lists/, etc.  In fact, if smail is purged all the mailing
lists will be lost, which is a scary thought.

Mail is a critical system service, and making hosts transition MTA
will cause disruption in a lot of places.  I think some thought should
be given to making sure potato ships with smail, at least for i386.
--
Barak A. Pearlmutter <bap@cs.unm.edu>, http://www.cs.unm.edu/~bap/