Re: Import of DragonFly Mail Agent

On Sun, Feb 23, 2014 at 4:11 PM, Baptiste Daroussin <bapt_at_freebsd.org>wrote:

> Hi,
>
> As some of you may have noticed, I have imorted a couple of days ago dma
> (DragonFly Mail Agent) in base. I have been asked to explain my motivation
> so
> here they are.
>
> DragonFly Mail Agent is a minimalistic mailer that is able to relay mails
> to
> some smtp servers (with TLS, authentication and so on)
>
> It supports MASQUERADE and NULLCLIENT, and is able to deliver mails locally
> (respecting aliases).
>
> I imported it because dma is lightweight, BSD license and easy to use.
>
> The code base is rather small and easy to capsicumize (which I plan to do)
>
> My initial goal is not to replace sendmail.


But is it an eventual goal?  *I* don't see why not, but if it is: what's
the plan?  How is the decision to drop sendmail going to be made when the
time comes?  (I.e. who _can_ and will make the call?)


> All I want is a small mailer
> simple to configure, and not listening to port 25, suitable for small
> environment (embedded and/or resource bounded) as well as for server
> deployment.
>

Playing devil's advocate: what specific problems is this trying to solve?
 I'd argue, for example, that postfix can be also easily configured and can
be made to not listen on port 25 for local mail delivery, while at the same
time it is a fully-functional MTA that could replace sendmail altogether.
 (Which, by the way, is the configuration with which postfix ships within
the NetBSD base system.)

The reason I'm asking these questions is because I have seen NetBSD
maintain two MTAs (sendmail + postfix) in the base system for _years_ and
it was not a pretty situation.  The eventual removal of sendmail was
appreciated, but of course it came with the associated bikeshedding.