As we all know, there are many sendmail compatible MTAs in Portage. Many users want to have these installed in tandem, so Gentoo provides an ebuild for BSD mailwrapper, enabled with the mailwrapper global USE flag. However, in comparison to… well… the rest of Gentoo, mailwrapper doesn’t really fit in that well. Having to comment/uncomment things in /etc/mail/mailer.conf is inconvenient and a hassle.
I woke up with a hangover a few Saturdays ago and while I was in the shower I had a bit of an idea: to provide a tool that creates symlinks for each MTA. I drafted an RFC and sent it into net-mail@gentoo.org. The idea behind it is to have a mailer.conf-style configuration file (I’ve called these profiles in the RFC, just for the sake of it) provided by each MTA. These are installed in /etc/mail/ and then a symlink is created to /etc/mail/mailer.conf so that no modifications to net-mail/mailwrapper are necessary.
As a result, no user is going to have to mess around with etc-update and /etc/mail/mailer.conf, nor will they have to worry about editing it by hand. They’ll just use a simple tool, mailer-config, to change which MTA is in use.
Expect it to reach Portage in the next week (or maybe even earlier).
I always thought mailwrapper was pretty clever but now you mention it, I can’t think why they didn’t do it like that in the first place. It’s much better.
Maybe because no one had such a hangover 😛
More to come soon.
Cheers,
Ferdy