why is sendmail the adopted mta?

[Michel Talon]

Mads Martin Joergensen wrote:
>>  Either them or the NetBSD people
>> offer sendmail and postfix in the base system, so it is not a
>> "lese-Berkeley" crime to ask for such a thing.

After verification it is NetBSD. They have postfix in the base install as
well as sendmail, apparently this doesn't cause gigantic license problems.

> 
> Just for the record; I would _love_ to see Postfix as default MTA.

Why causing problems to people accustomed to sendmail and who love the way
it works? Having postfix as a port is perfectly reasonable as long as 
something simple is provided to purge the system from sendmail when one
installs postfix. This is exactly what happens on Debian, they use Exim
as the default mailer (because they like the licence) but if you choose to
install postfix, exim is deinstalled automatically. 

The main grief i have with the present status on FreeBSD is that some
commands in sendmail and postfix have the same name, hence the man pages of
one program hide the man pages of the other. Same problem if you have Bind8
and Bind9 as a port,the man pages get hidden, worse, some tools as dig,
etc. have a bind8 version and a bind9 version slightly different which hide
reciprocally, etc. So pretending that the existence of a port solves the
problem is very partial.

Of course all this is in no way a high priority in my opinion, it can wait
until all sorts of things have been developed. However if Dragonflybsd has
the good fortune of becoming mainstream (we all hope that) it would be nice
that these sorts of problems are straightened out.

-- 
Michel Talon