14.0 and sendmail: daily error message from "freebsd-update cron"

M

Martin Jangowski

My longterm home server (a HP Microserver Gen 7) runs FBSD on a ZFS raid-z2 since installation about 10 years ago. Did all the major and minor updates without major problems (except the one time it didn't boot from ZFS after an upgrade).

Now I did the upgrade 13.2->14.0. Worked fine. I'm using sendmail in a production environment for about 30 years now and won't change this. So I reversed the change of the MTA back to sendmail, recompiled sendmail to use AUTH and everything works happy as before. However, every day my "freebsd-update cron" cronjob sends an error message like this:

Looking up update.FreeBSD.org mirrors... 3 mirrors found.
Fetching metadata signature for 14.0-RELEASE from update1.freebsd.org... done.
Fetching metadata index... done.
Inspecting system... done.
Preparing to download files... done.
The following files will be updated as part of updating to
14.0-RELEASE-p5:
/usr/lib/debug/usr/libexec/sendmail/sendmail.debug
/usr/libexec/sendmail/sendmail

A "freebsd-update install" reinstalls the AUTH-less sendmail. I need AUTH, so I recompile sendmail. Do I have to live with this error message for the rest of my (FreeBSD-) live?

Martin
 
Martin Jangowski said:
I'm using sendmail in a production environment for about 30 years now and won't change this.
Click to expand...
If you like sendmail, that's fine, why not. Then, there's also mail/sendmail you could use.

I personally think it's an "error" to still have sendmail in base. But anyways, building a part of base (here: sendmail) yourself and still wanting to use binary updates will conflict. The binary distribution of base is built with all-default options of course. If this didn't conflict for you so far, I'd rather wonder why not.

So in a nutshell: Either build base yourself (installing with make installkernel and make installworld) and don't use freebsd-update(8), or use the base sendmail as is, or use the sendmail from ports instead.
 
Martin Jangowski said:
It never occured to me that sendmail is in the ports.... It always was in base.
Click to expand...
It's been in ports since 2000 😉

Yes, it was always in base, mainly because some MTA is needed for a fully working "unixy" base system, and a long time ago, there wasn't really an alternative to sendmail. Now that we have dma(8), I'd expect sendmail to be removed from base, maybe in 15.0, we will see. Simple rationale, a base MTA only needs a very limited feature set, and if you need more, installing a port/package makes much more sense (there's a lot of choice, besides sendmail also postfix and exim etc.). The binary base distribution should fit for (almost) everyone, so having to fiddle with base build options to get the MTA you need isn't the greatest idea either (and still limits you to sendmail, while many people prefer one of the alternatives).
 
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