Removal of postfix from base

[Scott James Remnant]

I would like to propose the removal of Postfix from base for hoary.

 1) Postfix is a large, fully-featured MT&DA -- yet our default
    configuration is intended to only allow local mail delivery.

 2) Desktop users will "generally" not require an MTA, as most MUAs can
    deliver mail themselves (hiding evo2.1 under the carpet, briefly).

 3) Server users will have specific MT&DA requirements, and won't feel
    put out from having to install and configure one along with any other
    server they require.

 4) A local MDA would be useful for receiving cron reports, there are
    far simpler systems out there than Postfix.

 5) Postfix listens on port 25, this goes against our "no open ports"
    policy.

 6) Not only does it listen, it rejects mail -- causing major problems
    for users of dial-up ISPs who deliver mail via SMTP.

 7) It does, however, happily accept mail for $USER at localhost
    _from_the_network_ and deliver it.


I propose we move postfix into supported, where it can live with the
other servers.  We could consider promoting exim4 into universe in its
place also, but that's a different argument.

In base, I suggest we aim for the simplest possible MDA.

 1) not a daemon, provides only /usr/sbin/sendmail

 2) delivers mail locally

 3) [optional] delivers mail externally "sensibly", could possibly pick
    up per-user preferences to do this.

 4) [optional] if delivering mail externally, startup script resumes any
    deliveries that didn't complete before shutdown.


If there's no available software, I suspect it would be trivial to
implement in Python.

Scott
-- 
Scott James Remnant           The Mataró Sessions, Ubuntu Conference #2
scott at canonical.com            Mataró, Spain -- December 6th-17th 2004
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