Hello, Gentoo. Right at the moment, I feel a lot of sympathy with Alan Grimes, and need a lot of restraint in avoiding the use of swear words in describing some Gentoo developer.
What has happened is that somebody decided to add virtual/mta-1 surreptitiously to the default software set in Gentoo. This installs something called nullmailer, which I don't need, didn't ask for, and fouls up my mail transmission. nullmailer installs a file /usr/sbin/sendmail. This masks out the correct /usr/bin/sendmail (which is a symbolic link to s/qmail, which I installed by hand, not using emerge) because /usr/sbin is before /usr/bin in $PATH. It appears that nullmailer was installed on 2018-06-15. Up until recently, things seemed to work; mutt seems to bind itself to the sendmail it finds at (mutt's) installation time. However, mutt-1.10.1 was released in the last couple of days. It bound itself to the imposter sendmail. So, when I sent mail from mutt, nullmailer simply swallowed it up, without forwarding it to its destination (nullmailer not being configured). There were no signs of this lack of action anywhere to be seen. SO, WATCH OUT, FELLOW GENTOOERS! The temporary solution was to rename /usr/sbin/sendmail, and to reinstall mutt. That's how I'm able to send this mail. This has cost me ~two hours of time, so far. But what's the proper method to tell my gentoo system that I don't want crud like nullmailer installed? How can I guard myself against such presumptiousness on the part of the Gentoo devs in the future? Is this worth a bug report? -- Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
