From: Niall O Broin (niall at domain linux.ie)
Date: Fri 31 Aug 2001 - 12:30:03 IST
On Fri, Aug 31, 2001 at 01:53:35AM +0100, kevin lyda wrote:
> ok, since i didn't look it up in the bat book i didn't say it definitively
> assuming if someone disagreed, they'd look it up. but no...
>
> see chapter thirty of the bat book, first sentence: "the sendmail program
> does not perform the actual delivery of mail." the first example of
We're definitely in danger of becoming pedantic here. Fair enough, the
sendmail program, being the /usr/lib/sendmail binary, does not write
/var/spool/mail/$USER. For that matter, /usr/sbin/postfix doesn't either - I
don't know enough about either qmail or exim to hazard a guess as to what
they do. But on the only box I still manage using sendmail local delivery is
handled by /bin/mail.local which is in the sendmail RPM and is delivered as
part of the sendmail source distribution. To my simple mind, that's part of
sendmail, as against using a separate MDA such as procmail (and yes, I
realise that the mail.local binary is just as separate from the sendmail
binary as the procmail binary is). Postfix uses the local program, which
again is part of postfix, although it's separate from the /usr/sbin/postfix
binary.
Actually, this discussion is starting to sound dangerously like Stallman on
GNU/Linux (a viewpoint for which I have much sympathy, but let's not go
there). Instead of "No, it's not Linux, Linux is only a part of a Linux
based GNU system" we have "No, it's not sendmail, it's only part of a
sendmail based system".
Niall
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