[OpenIndiana-discuss] Proposal: OpenIndiana Stable Branch

[Richard L. Hamilton]

On Jan 25, 2011, at 10:22 PM, Ken Gunderson wrote:

> 
> On Tue, 2011-01-25 at 10:58 -0800, Alan Coopersmith wrote:
>> On 01/25/11 10:50 AM, Ken Gunderson wrote:
>>> As for the MTA discussion, Postfix is pretty much a drop in replacement
>>> for Sendmail, and my vote would be to replace Sendmail entirely. 
>> 
>> I still don't understand this subthread - if someone wants to start working
>> on postfix as a development project for a future release, that makes sense,
>> but doing it as a bug fix in a stable branch that's just supposed to be
>> providing fixes for the b148 already shipped?   That just seems to violate
>> the definition of a stable branch.   At the very least it should go into
>> the development branch first to get some testing before you even consider
>> backporting it to stable.
>> 
>> (Not that I get a vote - that's up to the developers who actually do the
>> work, not those of us just here to provide color commentary.)
> 
> 
> Few are going to use Sendmail for anything other than sending notices to
> root.  It would create a better first impression if OI shipped with a
> modern MTA such as Postfix or Exim.  Postfix, being a drop in
> replacement for Sendmail, would be relatively painless.  There's a
> saying that you never get a 2nd chance to make a 1st impression. Also
> that perception is 9/10ths of reality.....
> 
> Sure, the *BSD ship with Sendmail, but that is mostly for historical
> reasons and that nobody wants to get into a holy war as to what a more
> modern default should be.  At the time Debian opted for Exim, Sendmail
> was one security exploit after another waiting to happen, Postfix was
> not yet in existence and Qmail, the other potential contender, had an
> unacceptable license.  Several Linux distributions ship with Postfix.
> Just because Oracle makes a poor decision and ships Sendmail doesn't
> mean OI necessarily has to follow, no?
> 
> It's not a big deal to me.  I was expressing agreement with others
> who've lobbied for Postfix. 
> 
> -- 
> Ken Gunderson <kgunders at teamcool.net>

Well...I still think that for unusual situations, sendmail is
probably more flexible than anything else (although very few
people probably have gone to the trouble to figure out how to
take advantage of that).  It's had a lot of security problems
over the years, but it's also received a lot of cleanup TLC
and gotten much better.

Postfix is probably the easiest drop-in replacement.  But IMO
a packaging of it should get lots of testing before going into
a stable distro, and regardless of which is eventually the
default or preferred choice, both should remain available.