Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

Posted Aug 1, 2013 19:45 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333)
Parent article: Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

The /usr/bin/sendmail is a API and is one that many many things look for.

All you have to do is look at the fact that other MTA (postfix, qmail, also provides a '/usr/bin/sendmail' work-alike script or binary to replace it.

I really see no purpose in breaking a billion and a half scripts to get rid of sendmail. All you have to do is replace sendmail binary with a python script or something else that just pipes the output to /var/spool/mail. That way you get to get rid of your MTA and you get to not break stuff. Make it fedora policy to not have anything send mails to local mta without user configuring it to do that first. Then later on in Fedora 23 or 24 or whatever you just have /usr/bin/sendmail output to your logging mechanism and leave it at that.

What is really the problem here? So what if /usr/bin/sendmail isn't a POSIX requirement or what the hell ever. Lots of other Unix programs stick around and don't get used by anybody simply because people have forgotten about them.

You don't want to break third party packages and people's scripts just because of something so minor. It's also impossible to configure a MTA in a 'right' way. So the answer is just get rid of the MTA and replace it with a mechanism that won't break stuff needlessly.

Done.

Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

Posted Aug 1, 2013 21:27 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (18 responses)

> What is really the problem here?

The real problem is that the idea that a *nix system can send e-mail, send log messages to another server, and other things like that is considered "obsolete" and functionality that needs to be removed.

this is why they are planning on no longer having a syslog daemon that can communicate over the network (the systemd journal is all that anyone needs), and similarly, if you accept that most people cannot use an MTA for some reason, removing it is considered 'good'

I've never understood why having the local MTA configured to deliver mail to your ISP's mail server on port 25, with it mapping root@<yourserver> to your e-mail address is considered such an evil thing.

It's not what I want, but I run my own mail server and domain, so I really do use a MTA, and syslog daemon.

But apparently people like me aren't the target for Fedora any longer. According to Lennart, people like me are "the stone age"

Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

Posted Aug 2, 2013 0:16 UTC (Fri) by bloopletech (guest, #71203) [Link] (4 responses)

Is installing sendmail with your package manager _that_ hard? It's not like they are deleting sendmail from the universe - you just have to install the package.

I'm an avid vim user, and I use Ubuntu. Ubuntu ships with a fairly useless tiny version of vim. Do I get annoyed? No, I sudo apt-get install vim-gnome (the -gnome means it has X11 clipboard support etc etc; I use terminal vim exclusively).

Given that sendmail is fairly despised, usually replaced by a different API-compatible program, and not usable or useful for the majority of users (most people who use POP/IMAP/SMTP probably use a mail client like Evolution/Thunderbird/etc rather than sendmail binaries), why _should_ it be in the base install?

Also, Ubuntu _already_ doesn't ship sendmail in the base install, and it's not even in the main package set (it's in 'universe'). So if Fedora is meant to be edgy, it sure doesn't seem like it here.

(I'm sure Fedora generally is a great distro, just like I believe Ubuntu is.)

Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

Posted Aug 2, 2013 1:35 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (3 responses)

If this was just switching sendmail out for some other MTA (exim, postfix, etc) there wouldn't be any significant discussion. Several other Distros have switched to a different MTA by default. All of them include /usr/bin/sendmail as a link that provides something that is equivalent for scripts to use.

The point here is that Lennart is saying that any Distro that's not in the 'stone age' shouldn't have ANY MTA installed at all.

That's the part that's causing people to protest.

Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

Posted Aug 2, 2013 2:12 UTC (Fri) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (2 responses)

If your software assumes that /usr/bin/sendmail will generate output that will be read by a user, your software is making a false assumption (a huge number of users now only read webmail, to the extent that not all ISPs provide an SMTP smarthost any more). Why provide an interface that's known to be broken?

(To avoid the obvious arguments: yes, there are plenty of cases where you can guarantee that there's an installed MTA that will deliver mail to a user who will read it. But all of those cases involve manual configuration, and so adding "install an MTA" to the list of steps required isn't a huge imposition)

Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

Posted Aug 2, 2013 10:48 UTC (Fri) by etienne (guest, #25256) [Link] (1 responses)

> But all of those cases involve manual configuration

Isn't it just having a ".forward" file in your home directory?

Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

Posted Aug 2, 2013 14:04 UTC (Fri) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

No, it's also telling sendmail how to deliver mail to the outside world.

Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

Posted Aug 2, 2013 3:35 UTC (Fri) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

> The real problem is that the idea that a *nix system can send e-mail, send log messages to another server, and other things like that is considered "obsolete" and functionality that needs to be removed.

Wrong. That's not even close. No one is trying to take syslog or sendmail away from you if you want to use them. If you are going to try and participate in a technical discussion I'd appreciate it if you'd actually try and understand what the issues were, I know you are smart and capable of it.

Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

Posted Aug 2, 2013 7:16 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (9 responses)

The real problem is that the idea that a *nix system can send e-mail, send log messages to another server, and other things like that is considered "obsolete" and functionality that needs to be removed.

I think you're confusing »removing package X that does Y from the Fedora default install« with »removing any package that does Y from Fedora completely«. AFAICT nobody is suggesting removing all MTAs from Fedora.

In addition, people who do intentionally want to run an MTA are probably going to have a fairly strong preference for which MTA they want to run, and in 2013, in many cases that preference is not going to be Sendmail. It is reasonable to argue that if most Fedora users have no use for a local MTA in the first place, and out of those who do many will not actually want to use Sendmail in particular, it makes little sense to pre-install Sendmail by default. Those people who do want Sendmail specifically (as opposed to, say, Postfix) can still find it in the repository.

Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

Posted Aug 2, 2013 7:27 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (8 responses)

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but as I understand Lennart's argument, it's not opposing Sendmail in particular (saying that a different MTA would be better), it's making it so that the base install of Fedora will have NO MTA installed, not Sendmail, not Exim, not Postfix, nothing.

If you really think that the majority of your userbase is going to be on ISPs that don't let MTAs go out to the Internet, a better solution that "eliminate the MTA" would be to have the distro install ask for outbound mail server info, and ask for an e-mail address to use to send messages to the system owner/admin. then store this info in a 'known place' for the distro. configure the MTA to deliver to this mail server (and deliver root mail to the e-mail address provided), and have mail client packages auto-configure themselves from this 'known place' as part of their installation scripts (while allowing users to override this by configuring it themselves after install)

The mindset that "in some cases this isn't useful, so we should remove it completely from the install and force anyone who wants to to install it manually" seems very wrong to me.

Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

Posted Aug 2, 2013 7:38 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (7 responses)

The mindset that "in some cases this isn't useful, so we should remove it completely from the install and force anyone who wants to to install it manually" seems very wrong to me.

I think there is something to be said for keeping the default installation lean. One could argue that having something like gcc, Emacs or TeX around would be »useful except in some cases«, but even so these packages are usually not part of the default installation.

I quite agree that it would be reasonable for distributions to allow the installing user to specify a destination for outbound mail to an administrator. It is by no means clear, however, that supporting this use case would require a full-blown MTA on the scale of Sendmail to be installed by default.

Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

Posted Aug 2, 2013 7:42 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (5 responses)

actually, I will somewhat disagree with you.

I think that for an opensource/free software desktop, gcc should be installed by default. Emacs and TeX aren't needed (says a vi user ;-) but it's hard to do very much stuff other than just being a consumer of services without running into some need for gcc, at least indirectly.

Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

Posted Aug 2, 2013 7:48 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (3 responses)

I think that for an opensource/free software desktop, gcc should be installed by default.

I'm with you, but:

not every Linux system ends up as an »opensource/free software desktop« (I personally try to avoid installing gcc on my servers), and …
tell that to the distribution makers. I don't know whether Fedora installs gcc by default, but Debian and openSUSE – to name two other very popular distributions – don't.

Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

Posted Aug 2, 2013 10:27 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

personally, I don't like any distro's stock install for a production server. There's always something I want to add to the stock install, and several things that I remove.

I like how Debian has a "minimal" install, which is fairly close to the minimum needed to boot, talk on the network, and install additional packaged. This doesn't include gcc, but it doesn't include X or any "desktop" software either. This makes it a good starting point for a server build.

Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

Posted Aug 2, 2013 12:08 UTC (Fri) by peter-b (guest, #66996) [Link] (1 responses)

Fedora also has a "minimal" install (@core) which is exactly the same thing: just enough to boot and install packages.

Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

Posted Aug 13, 2013 3:36 UTC (Tue) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link]

> Fedora also has a "minimal" install (@core) which is exactly the same thing: just enough to boot and install packages.

Well, it has more than that. For example, it had sendmail in it before we decided, with this change, to remove it from that set.

Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

Posted Aug 2, 2013 20:29 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link]

But surely you agree that there are thousands of useful packages that should not be in the default install. What I haven't seen yet is what you think sets MTAs apart from those. Is it because an MTA has been in the default install in the past?

Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

Posted Aug 2, 2013 11:48 UTC (Fri) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link]

"I think there is something to be said for keeping the default installation lean."

Those defaults are part of the problem not the solution since people dont seem to realize for the first nothing goes away from Fedora unless it's dead upstream or no one no longer maintains it here with us so it just means things just get shuffled in,out or between comps groups.

And while we have an "default" this will always be the case, people always scream if something is added or removed to the so called "default" instead of those individuals engaging and participating in the relevant sub-community and influence and have that discussion there.

Which is why I'm forming a Gnome SIG an Gnome sub-community within Fedora [1] which will be aimed to deliver upstream modern, high-quality Gnome optimized desktop only experience targeted towards regular people for regular usage on common hardware. No more lvm, no more rsyslog, no more sendmail no more half baked enterprise/admin/desktop "defaults" that wind up being equally crappy for everybody causing nothing but tension,arguments and friction within our community and no more holding back progress in the process.

And this will sail proudly under the name Gnome not "defaults" or "desktop" just like KDE,XFCE,LXDE Sugar and other sub-community already are and have been doing for all those years...

If you are interested in participating in this effort feel free to join.

1. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/Gnome

Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

Posted Aug 2, 2013 12:39 UTC (Fri) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (1 responses)

The problem is that it doesn't usually work that well anymore.

If you have some nice traditional server setup with a bunch of nodes all on the same network segment then it'll work, otherwise it's all just random chance if it works or not unless you actually configure things manually.

And if, like most people I am guessing, are going to configure a MTA it's going to probably be Postfix and not Sendmail.

Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

Posted Aug 2, 2013 17:02 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

> And if, like most people I am guessing, are going to configure a MTA it's going to probably be Postfix and not Sendmail.

If they were proposing to change the default from Sendmail to Postfix, I don't think there would be any fuss. Several other Distros have done the same thing.

this isn't about keeping Sendmail, it's about keeping an MTA.

Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

Posted Aug 8, 2013 13:27 UTC (Thu) by Otus (subscriber, #67685) [Link]

> The /usr/bin/sendmail is a API and is one that many many things look for.

There are a lot of APIs that distros don't install by default.

Usually a package that uses such APIs should depend on other packages that
provide it.

I don't see how this is any different. Whether sendmail is installed by
default should depend only on whether other defaults depend on it.