Re: mailutils in stretch

[Sven Joachim <svenjoac@gmx.de>]

On 2017-07-07 16:52 +0200, Erwan David wrote:

> Le 07/07/17 à 16:39, Sven Joachim a écrit :
>> In fact, various packages have been demoted from Priority
>> standard or important to optional in recent years.  This includes the
>> venerable "ed" text editor for instance, and also any package providing
>> /usr/bin/mail.  Apparently the reason is that they pull in an MTA which
>> is also no longer included by default.  Which seems sensible to me BTW.
>
> A small relaying only MTA could be installed by default, eg ssmtp.

Good luck changing the default MTA in Debian, that has been under
discussion on debian-devel for at least 18 years[1].  Besides,
maintainers cannot even agree which MTA they prefer to pull in if one is
needed by their packages:

,----
| $ grep-dctrl -FDepends mail-transport-agent -n -sDepends /var/lib/apt/lists/*unstable*Packages | sed -e 's/, /\n/g' | grep mail-transport-agent | sort -u
| default-mta | exim4 | mail-transport-agent
| default-mta | mail-transport-agent
| exim | mail-transport-agent
| exim4 | mail-transport-agent
| exim4 | postfix | mail-transport-agent
| exim4 | postfix | sendmail | mail-transport-agent
| exim4-daemon-light | mail-transport-agent
| mutt | mailx | mail-transport-agent
| postfix | exim4 | mail-transport-agent
| postfix | mail-transport-agent
| sendmail | mail-transport-agent
| sendmail-bin | mail-transport-agent
`----

Cheers,
       Sven


1. https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1999/06/thrd5.html#01981