Commands and Utilities Proposal, 0.2

[Daniel Quinlan]

Daniel Quinlan <quinlan at transmeta.com> writes:

>> Do we really want applications relying on mail or mailx?  Isn't it
>> better practice to use the local copy of /usr/sbin/sendmail?

Jakob 'sparky' Kaivo <jkaivo at elijah.nodomainname.net> writes:

> Yes, it is better practice to use sendmail. But, there are a large
> number of existing scripts and programs that rely on /bin/mail (and a
> good number of those rely on /bin/mail acting like mailx). We need to
> accomodate those. Also, UNIX98 mandates mailx and their is no real
> compelling reason not to.

Accomodating broken programs isn't a requirement.  /bin/mail isn't
standardized, so you can get different programs on different systems.
mailx is standardized, but is designed to be an *interactive* mail
system.  Unix98 mandates it, but we need to be careful.  Our focus is
on programs used by applications, not interactive users.

I think it would be better to document a subset of the sendmail API
for LSB applications.

Dan