MTA in ubuntu deskop

[LaMont Jones]

On Wed, Feb 09, 2005 at 12:32:50PM +1100, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> <quote who="LaMont Jones">
> These are the only changes that make me slightly uncomfortable. mutt is
> still useful without an MTA, and it would suck a bit to not have an LSB
> compliant system by default. Perhaps these could be resolved by using
> Scott's dummy sendmail? I would feel more comfortable with clear failure
> accompanied by a "you really need to install a real MTA" message than to
> make all of this Not Work (tm) by default [1]. :-)

How would you feel about delivering a /usr/sbin/sendmail that was not
listed as part of a package? (That is, created in postinst.)  That would
avoid the situation where installing a real MTA would cause ubuntu-base
or ubuntu-desktop to be removed, while still giving you a solid error.
At that point, we could just have the packages Recommend: the mta stuff.

I really want to avoid forcing people to uninstall ubuntu-meta packages.
The alternative is to have the package exist outside of
ubuntu-{base,desktop}, and have debootstrap install ubuntu-base +
dummy-mta.

thoughts?
lamont