Bug#714634: [lsb-discuss] Clarification of general LSB requirements

On Thu, Jul 11, 2013 at 09:53:52AM +0200, Aaron Sowry wrote:
> On Wed, 2013-07-10 at 17:25 -0700, Steve Langasek wrote:
> > If lsb-core is going to pull in default-mta as the preferred option, then
> > arguably lsb-invalid-mta shouldn't exist at all

> I agree. None of the suggested solutions address the crontab issue, and
> there may be other similar problems we haven't found yet.

No, you aren't agreeing.  I'm saying that *either* lsb-core should prefer
lsb-invalid-mta, *or* lsb-invalid-mta should not exist.  lsb-invalid-mta,
without a Provides: mail-transport-agent, *does* satisfy the cron issue.

> I realise that Ubuntu perceives this as a problem, and it seems to stem
> from the fact that Debian's default sendmail client implementation
> (exim4) is intimately tied to the server component. But Debian !=
> Ubuntu, and I agree with Debian's definition that an MTA should consist
> of both server and client components.

Debian has no definition of an MTA that says anything about "server and
client components".

Also, lsb-invalid-mta may have originated in Ubuntu, but that doesn't mean
Ubuntu has different requirements from Debian here.  The lsb-invalid-mta
package as implemented is buggy with respect to *both* distributions, for
the reason I described.

> That said, there is no reason why a simple sendmail client cannot be
> provided separately by those distributions which don't want to have to
> install a server - is this a completely unreasonable course of action for
> Canonical to take?

For the record, this is not a decision for Canonical to take, it is a
decision to be made by the Ubuntu community.

And no, this would not solve the problem that lsb-invalid-mta was introduced
to solve, which is that *you can't have a working mta without prompting the
user for configuration*.  There are plenty of implementations of
mail-transport-agent in Debian and Ubuntu which don't require running a
daemon (nullmailer, ssmtp), but if you expect to use them to send mail, you
still need them to be configured, and that's what this package is intended
to avoid.

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
[email protected]                                     [email protected]

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