Comment 15 for bug 141641

Martin-Éric Racine wrote:
> I'm amazed that it hasn't crossed anyone's mind that the LSB mind be
> hopelessly backward thinking, when it expects sendmail to be present
> upon every system. In honesty, too many of the LSB specification's
> elements point to a fixed-IP network built of traditional UNIX hosts.
> That paradigm hasn't been anywhere close to representing real life
> Internet usage of average Joe Buntu desktop user or of other non-server
> Linux usage cases for a long time.

The sendmail spec in the LSB is an interface: nothing more. It does not
have to be a full MTA any more than, say, printf(3) must be a kernel
interface.

We have shopped around the idea of dropping sendmail, and met with
strong opposition from many of our ISVs. People rely on sendmail being
there today.

If Ubuntu is not happy with postfix as their default implementation of
the sendmail interface, we invite them to choose a lightweight
alternative. I believe several are even provided in Ubuntu already;
they certainly are provided in Debian, and could easily be pulled in. I
have personally had good luck with ssmtp; although it requires some
configuration, the burden is not nearly as high as with postfix.

Alternatively, you're free to explore a better standard interface for
sending mail than sendmail, and getting ISVs on board with it. Apart
from our deprecation policy, we're not married to the specific sendmail
interface. As long as ISVs are happy with the functionality they're
provided, we can change it.