Re: [gentoo-dev] mailwrapper

[Grant Goodyear]

> That's a good reason to make sendmail, qmail, etc. depend on
> net-mail/mailwrapper - but adding a package to 'system' that is only
> needed by packages that are _not_ in system seems a little odd.

When I said I thought that mailwrapper should be installed by default, I 
meant that it should be an automatic dependency for any mta, not that it 
should be in the system profile.

> That said, what about turning this into 'mta-config', along the lines of
> gcc-config?  That way, if I decide I want to start using qmail instead
> of sendmail, I could do something along the lines of ``mta-config
> qmail''.  This approach seems to work well for GCC, and I don't see why
> an equivelant approach (perhaps via a mailwrapper wrapper) wouldn't work
> here - not to mention remaining consistent with some other *-config
> wrappers.

If somebody else wants to write it, I'm more than happy to evaluate it. 
    Seemant recently pointed out to me Redhat's mta-switcher package, 
which is probably more along the lines of an "mta-config"-like program, 
but it's a substantially heavier program than what I was really looking 
for.  The reason that I've suggested mailwrapper is that it's simple, 
lightweight, and it's pretty well tested on the *BSDs.  As far as bloat 
goes, the mailwrapper binary is about 7K in size.  Now one could 
reasonably argue that any unnecessary programs on the system constitute 
unwelcome bloat, but in this case I believe that the flexibility that a 
/usr/sbin/sendmail wrapper offers more than makes up for it.  I suspect 
that I'm not the only Gentoo user who has wanted to try qmail or exim 
but never has because switching MTAs on Gentoo has always meant 
unmerging the already-working MTA.

Best,
g2boojum