Re: Conflicting alternatives

[Dan Ritter <dsr@randomstring.org>]

Richard Hector wrote: 
> There are multiple standard ports, though. E.g. one could easily run one MTA
> on port 25 for incoming mail, and another on 587 for outgoing.
> 
> My point, though, was that there's a precedent for daemons that default to
> listening on the same port, yet are co-installable. And which will, IIRC,
> throw errors on installation if you try it without paying special attention.

I think several people in this discussion are missing a cultural
point.

The web is not special. Some people will care about whether the
webservers fail, some will not. This is an individual,
circumstantial thing. If you run a minecraft server or a
database or a calendar service, you might care about those
things and want to install monitors, but ultimately all those
services are not integral to the functioning of the system.

Mail is special. Mail is sacred. Screwing up your mail system is
a big deal. Mail is how the system informs the sysadmin of what
went wrong in the middle of the night. Even if the mail system
is configured not to talk to other machines, it serves as a
primary communications method for cron jobs and daemons to send
messages to humans.

Culturally, people who do not care about whether mail fails are not
people who can be trusted to run systems.

That is, I think, why Debian offers a choice of MTAs but does not allow
them to be co-installed.

-dsr-