Marc Haber wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 16, 2005 at 09:44:52AM +0000, Philip Hazel wrote:
>
>>On Wed, 16 Feb 2005, Marc Haber wrote:
*SNIP*
>
> I am pretty well aware that Debian is unpopular with exim upstream for
> shipping ancient versions and for using a non-standard configuration
> scheme since we need to be runnable out of the box.
*SNIP*
Exim, from generic tarball (three or four boxen now on the snapshot),
ports, or pkgsrc is 'runnable out of the box' on the *BSD's (including
newbie DragonFlyBSD)
with nothing more than:
Outbound:
- Having one or more non-root shell accounts.
and/or
- Having a valid email address for 'root' in '/etc/aliases' - which gets
the chron'ed daily reports off-box...
Inbound:
Copying /usr/local/etc/exim/configure.default to
/usr/local/etc/exim/configure (which could be added to the makefile).
The defaults are sane enough for basic messaging.
and, of course, starting the daemon....
- at which point, providing the box has a valid <domain>.<tld>, (at
least) all shell account holders in /etc/master.passwd
have both-way mail.
Neither OS/2's Postfix (AKA 'sendmail.exe') nor Mac OS X's Postfix do
that - nor should they, unbidden.
Too many workstations think they are 'servers' and should be running
only MUA's, not MTA's.
Setting up for virtual hosting, non-shell holders, providing POP, IMAP,
Webmail, etc. requires more work of some kind on *any* platform.
So how and why is Debian so different from the *BSD's (as a server OR
workstation) or OS X (as a workstation) - or other Linuxes, even,
...that is has to use stale Exim releases, and/or non-standard
configurations/toolsets to be 'runnable out of the box'?
Debian may be different from Red Flag, Slackware, Knoppix, Morphix, or
Red Hat,
- but 'runnable out of the box' does not compute as a rationale for
breaking something.
YOMD.
Bill Hacker
