[lsb-discuss] Possible to get rid of /usr/bin/sendmail requirement in LSB 4.1?

[Jeff Licquia]

Till Kamppeter wrote:
> Now I want to know whether there happened already investigations 
> concerning the removal of /usr/bin/sendmail from the LSB 4.1 
> requirements, as Mats Wichmann talked about in his comment on 
> above-mentioned bug report.

Well, we have our deprecation policy.  In LSB 4.1, we can deprecate the
sendmail command, which would put it on track for removal around LSB 7.

There's also the matter of POSIX.  I don't know whether POSIX has
considered removing the command or not.

Ultimately, though, I have said in the past that an MTA is not required
by the LSB; just the sendmail command.  There are a number of packages
that provide sendmail without a full MTA; for example, ssmtp.  If the
current options don't provide a sufficiently stripped-down sendmail
command, then someone should write one.  We have other facilities for
receiving system messages that do not require a full mail setup; perhaps
sendmail could become an interface to those.

> I also want to know whether one can perhaps surround this requirement by 
>   letting the LSB-packaged software not require "lsb" but a sub-package 
> like for example "lsb-printing". Are these sub-package names 
> standardized? We will also have to structure the content of the 
> sub-packages appropriately, as for now the "lsb-printing" of the "lsb" 
> package in Ubuntu requires "lsb-core" which in turn requires 
> /usr/bin/sendmail. perhaps one can change these dependencies somehow so 
> that lsb-printing does not pull sendmail.

We talked about this at the Summit, and have agreed in principle that
this should be done.  The details haven't been worked out, though.  The
original thought was to have something like "server" and "desktop"
dependencies that can be relied upon cross-distro, but with these other
considerations, we might have to add a few more.