On Thu, 17 Feb 2005 08:27:09 -0500, Marc Sherman
<msherman@???> wrote:
>I've long thought that Debian would be very well served by shipping a
>default alternative to the current exim4-config package, containing just
>a simple /etc/exim4/exim.conf file, configured by default for local
>delivery only, with no debconf support and no complex macros.
Install exim4 with debconf non-interactive frontend, and that's quite
exactly what you get.
otoh, there is no requirement that the package providing exim4-config
needs to be maintained by the Debian exim4 maintainers. Care to join
us?
>For that matter, you could easily solve 293968 by using different
>packages for the single-file and many-file versions of the current configs.
That sounds like a nightmare from the maintenance point of view.
Additionally, today, $OTHER_PACKAGE can drop whatever transport and/or
router it needs into the directory structure and both versions of the
current config can pick that up (single-file on explicit request, and
many-file on next daemon restart).
>> Debian has the Debconf frontend, which is mandatory to use, and other
>> ways of integrating debconf with exim's rather big, monolithic
>> configuration have shown not to be practical.
>
>That's misleading, Marc. Debconf use is not _required_ policy; rather,
>it's the only way _allowed_ by policy to interact with the user at
>install time. Policy makes it clear that eliminating interaction is far
>preferable. IMO, defaulting to local delivery only would be quite
>acceptable for a debconf-free installation.
All our MTA packages interact on installation.
>Well, you broke users' expectations of compatibility with upstream.
We are compatible with upstream by means of a manually created
/etc/exim4/exim4.conf. A lot of the "big" packages differ from
upstream's configuration scheme, apache being one of the most
prominent examples.
Greetings
Marc
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