Re: Debian's default MTA + MDA

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>]

On Fri, Sep 07, 2001 at 05:52:40PM +1000, Andrew Nesbit wrote:
> Colin Watson wrote:
> > It's exim. The only way to find this out is really to look through the
> > list of MTAs (that is, packages providing mail-transport-agent) and see
> > which one has the highest priority. (exim is 'Priority: important'; the
> > priorities are required, important, standard, optional, and extra.)
> 
> Where can I actually find this priority information? I had a look in the
> lists of packages on the Debian website, but couldn't find it.

It's not very convenient to find. Once you have Debian installed, 'dpkg
-p <packagename>' will tell you, or they'll be displayed in categories
in dselect. Beforehand, the easiest way is probably to look at the
Packages file on the FTP site (say,
ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/stable/main/binary-i386/Packages) and
look for the information there. You'll see blocks like:

  Package: dpkg
  [...]
  Priority: required
  [...]

For what it's worth, the required/important/standard packages in stable
for i386 are currently:

  required:

    adduser ae base-files base-passwd bash bsdutils console-data
    console-tools console-tools-libs debianutils diff dpkg e2fsprogs
    fileutils findutils grep gzip hostname ldso libc6 libgdbmg1
    libncurses5 libpam-modules libpam-runtime libpam0g libreadline4
    libstdc++2.10 login makedev mawk mbr modutils mount ncurses-base
    ncurses-bin passwd perl-5.005-base perl-base procps sed setserial
    shellutils slang1 sysklogd sysvinit tar textutils update util-linux

  important:

    at bc bsdmainutils cpio cron dc ed exim groff info libident
    libncurses4 libopenldap-runtime libopenldap1 libpcre2 libpopt0 lilo
    lockfile-progs logrotate mailx man-db manpages nvi perl-5.005 whois

  standard:

    apt biff bin86 binutils bison cpp debian-policy dnsutils doc-debian
    doc-linux-text dpkg-dev dpkg-ftp dpkg-perl emacs20 emacsen-common
    fdflush file finger fingerd flex ftp g++ gcc gdb gettext-base gpm
    iamerican ibritish ispell less libc6-dev liblockfile1 libnet-perl
    libpng2 libstdc++2.10-dev libwrap0 locales lpr lsof-2.2 lynx m4 make
    manpages-dev mime-support mpack mtools mutt ncurses-term netbase
    nfs-common nfs-server patch perl-5.005-doc perl-5.005-suid pidentd
    ppp procmail rcs sharutils strace talk talkd tcpd tcsh tcsh-i18n
    telnet telnetd tetex-base tetex-bin tetex-lib texinfo time wenglish
    xfree86-common xlib6g zlib1g

Things change a bit from release to release.

-- 
Colin Watson                                  [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]