Scripsit Ron Johnson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> On Tue, 2006-05-16 at 11:04 +0200, Henning Makholm wrote:
>> Scripsit "Steinar H. Gunderson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>> > On Mon, May 15, 2006 at 02:13:46PM +0200, Henning Makholm wrote:

>> >> Why not just install some software that can speak SMTP as the chroot's
>> >> /usr/bin/sendmail? E.g. nullmailer.

>> > nullmailer is, in general, broken.

>> Then something else. One can easily envisage installing as
>> /usr/bin/sendmail something that reads an email, immediately
>> sends it to a smarthost via SMTP and exits with an error if a problem
>> happened. No daemon, no local spool.

> Not all people have their systems configured that way.

The point is that they could if the wanted to. And if they did, it
would work for _all_ programs, not just particular perl scripts that
happen to use some obscure perl module to send mails.

> On the "home desktop" reportbug uses Python's smtp library to send
> email directly to the ISP's smtp server.  And that's a good thing,
> because, for a long time, reportbug did not have that feature, and
> people who don't know how to configure MTAs were not able to send
> bug reports.

Reportbug may be a special case in that.

>> There is a reason for having standardised interfaces. It is that they
>> can be implemented in different ways.

> Yes.  The standardized interface is smtp.

Not according to Debian policy. It is perfectly acceptable to have a
way of moving mail to and from the machine that does not use SMTP at
all, as long as it provides the standard /usr/sbin/sendmail interface
for programs that need to send mail.

-- 
Henning Makholm     Science, by its nature, is an uncertain undertaking, and
                  offers plenty of opportunity for failure no matter how you
             approach it. Yet among the myriad ways to get nowhere, the only
         fully reliable one is doing and thinking the same as everyone else.


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