[OmniOS-discuss] Bloody // mailwrapper & mta mediator

[Paul B. Henson]

On Wed, Nov 04, 2015 at 07:56:15AM -0500, Dan McDonald wrote:
> Does the *presence* of sendmail in a default install actually prevent
> folks from using their preferred MTAs with the mediator (which still
> works from what I can tell)?

I haven't had a chance to try out 016; I think other than being
unnecessary bloat and requiring actions to be taken to disable it
sendmail won't get in the way of another MTA.
 
> If indeed this is just about the sendmail bits being present, I have
> to say they stay, because we need an MTA out of the box, even a weak
> one, because of cron, nightly, and other bits.

It seems 014 managed to get by just fine all this time without an MTA
being installed by default, what changed? cron maybe, but nightly? How
many omnios boxes deployed do you think are compiling illumos? And of
those that are, how many are doing it without having been explicitly
configured to do so, including installing necessary additional packages?

Are you going to enable DHCP by default too now, so a box is magically
on the network after an install without needing to be configured? Maybe
set a default root password and enable sshd so a user doesn't need to
use the console to get on the box after the install before using it?
Where is the line drawn that separates "OS is installed" and "OS is
configured and ready to use"? I say the MTA falls on the far side of
that line. What is the default sendmail config, anyway? Does it try to
send directly to the Internet? How many environments allow that
nowadays? Wouldn't an admin most likely have to go configure a relayhost
before it would work? So much of out of the box... 

> If this blocks folks from configuring their systems, then I'm more
> willing to address this somehow.  IF (big IF) I end up re-yanking
> sendmail (undoing omnios-build issue #69), I will end up placing it in
> illumos-tools.

I don't think building illumos *requires* specifically sendmail? If a
user already has another MTA installed and working, what's the benefit
of forcing an unnecessary one to be installed as well? I recall being
rather annoyed when I set up my 014 build zone that the dev packages
pulled in sendmail when I already had postfix working fine.

Anyway, I think it's been made clear what my position is :)...