As you probably know, smail is removed from potato due to an RC bug. Said bug is present on the ALPHA architecture only. (Even there it is manifested only when running smail from inetd, which is not the recommended procedure - so I personally would classify it as "normal" rather than "grave".)
Anyway, since smail used to be the recommended MTA, the majority of the stable user base probably uses it. If i386 smail isn't included when potato releases, literally millions of boxes will be rather forcibly transitioned to a new MTA. For developers and testers this isn't a big deal because they're expecting things like that, and besides for obvious reasons they're not generally upgrading hosts that handle mail. But for lots of user sites this will be a serious problem. Especially for places that have actually configured the mailer, set up mailing lists in /etc/smail/lists/, etc. In fact, if smail is purged all the mailing lists will be lost, which is a scary thought. Mail is a critical system service, and making hosts transition MTA will cause disruption in a lot of places. I think some thought should be given to making sure potato ships with smail, at least for i386. -- Barak A. Pearlmutter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, http://www.cs.unm.edu/~bap/
