Proofpoint

[getopt]

How could you ever complain FreeBSD is not a complete operating system?

I did not complain. I asked.

Because FreeBSD is a full-featured operating system, though "full-featured" may be a key adjective for sendmail and whether that much is needed.

The term "full-featured" fits in marketing-speak, IMO. Those terms can be disputed all the time, as it always may be regarded as not featured fully enough, while other may be more satisfied with Nano-BSD.

 

[getopt]

But in the case of sendmail, my educated guess it that the FreeBSD project has sufficient manpower to review all changes to sendmail (here, man = Eric).

One always can sugarcoat the situation. One single person is likely one single point of failure. With all respects, generally speaking.

And I doubt that our FreeBSD project uses it's restrained manpower for explicit security auditing all 3rd-party contributions. If they did, they would publish security warnings for i.e. for contributions like OpenSSL before others publish them. I did not notice that this ever happened.

BTW the OpenSSL project did learn it the hard way being a one-man-project. That has been changed.

 

[drhowarddrfine]

The term "full-featured" fits in marketing-speak, IMO.

Yes, I had mentioned that the term may change what is being asked.

These weekly topic threads about this--and similar--are boring and pointless.

 

[getopt]

These weekly topic threads about this--and similar--are boring and pointless.

Please explain by what you mean with "weekly topic threads".
Why weekly and which topics?
What filter do you suggest?

Once a topic is started one may find it interesting or not. But lots of contribution add pointlessness and are indeed boring, inclusive reading about "weekly topic threads".

Hint: Do not waste your lifetime on reading or adding to whatever you may find boring or pointless. But do not expect that others share your taste.

 

[drhowarddrfine]

getopt
By weekly I mean, it seems every week we get a new thread that starts with "Why isn't FreeBSD like..." or it gets there eventually (which is off topic, too). Such things are boring because we wind up having to defend the reason FreeBSD does what it does and it shows no effort on the part of the asker. Especially an asker who obviously doesn't know how to use Google.

Yes, I don't waste my time reading or adding to such threads. If one has noticed, I don't participate as much as I used to for the reason given. Now that I have more time to think, I notice such things more and more.

 

[getopt]

"Why isn't FreeBSD like..." or it gets there eventually (which is off topic, too).

You suggest a forum-rule-based termination of this thread?

Because 3rd-party contributions are discussed?
Is that what you cannot stand personally?

BTW: I just watch my editing of this post. All edits are sent to /threads/proofpoint.<member>/draft
Which means that all your thoughts can be read even if you delete before posting the reply.

This is such a nice feature that I prefer editing in my local editor and just paste the final result from now on.

 

[PMc]

I think it is a very valid question to discuss why FreeBSD keeps sendmail but dropped BIND.
The security concerns of sendmail seem also a valid question - but these have already been discussed for more than twenty years.

The other aspect (and this is a personal one, but i think Off-Topic is a place to state personal impressions, too) whenever I need to lookup some of the features of sendmail (and I do it in the way we do things nowadays: I use google) then I end up at a snake-oil selling company (and the first thing they demand is that you disengage the security settings of your browser).

This is not an isolated effect, it rather seems to reflect the state of the Internet as a whole: whenever I try to lookup some other term, say psychology, social development or mysticism, I also get only to lots of snake-oil selling companies. In contrast, some 15 years ago there was still lots of valuable information to be found. This has mostly disappeared, in favour of "buy our crap!".
(It is better with BIND - there is also the "buy our products!" stuff, but there you get to an .org site, you get the impression that there are actual engineers involved, and they indeed have the current manual online. )

So this is what annoys me. I don't care if one or the other shop is linked to one or the other secret service or whatever, because there is a simplified approach: just consider them all criminals and you will not be surprized by their actions.

 

[PMc]

BTW: I just watch my editing of this post. All edits are sent to /threads/proofpoint.<member>/draft
Which means that all your thoughts can be read even if you delete before posting the reply.

*Laugh* How else should the temporary state of your edit be kept when you happen to restart the browser?
With more simple forum software the edit was kept in the form-data of the browser, and in case of a crash, the browser might restore it, or you could pull it out of that file.
With this one, it is stored on the server side. And that also has problems, because there is only one draft per thread. So, imagine you start to write a lengthy reply in some thread, then open a new browser window, write a short answer to some new posting in the same thread, then accidentially close the browser-window with the lengthy reply - then that draft is gone forever.

This is what hits me occasionally, and so this is a good idea:

This is such a nice feature that I prefer editing in my local editor and just paste the final result from now on.

Anyway, everything you enter into an AJAX enabled browser window, might get sent out to the network immediately.

 

[drhowarddrfine]

Because 3rd-party contributions are discussed?

I said nothing about that. But I'm not going to argue with you.

 

[getopt]

I said nothing about that. But I'm not going to argue with you.

As you can see it was just a question. I'm not interested either in "arguing".
So boring. So pointless.

 

[hardworkingnewbie]

I think it is a very valid question to discuss why FreeBSD keeps sendmail but dropped BIND.

For me BIND is quite simple: almost everybody does need a DNS resolver; but only a few percentage of users will have use for a domain name server. And most who are owning a domain will just use the DNS being provided by their ISP.

So BIND in the end is dragging around a tool where only a small area - DNS resolving - was and is used by the vast majority of users.

We could also just use the license argument - BIND is MPL-2.0 while Unbound is new BSD.

 

[Jose]

For me BIND is quite simple: almost everybody does need a DNS resolver; but only a few percentage of users will have use for a domain name server. And most who are owning a domain will just use the DNS being provided by their ISP.

So BIND in the end is dragging around a tool where only a small area - DNS resolving - was and is used by the vast majority of users.

We could also just use the license argument - BIND is MPL-2.0 while Unbound is new BSD.

Let's replace "BIND" with "Sendmail" in this post.

For me Sendmail is quite simple: almost everybody needs to send mail; but only a few percentage of users will have use for a mail forwarder. And most who do forward mail will just use the mail exchanger provided by their ISP.

So Sendmail in the end is dragging around a tool where only a small area - mail forwarding - was and is used by the vast majority of users.

We could also just use the license argument. Sendmail is no longer BSD-licensed while DMA is.

(Begging hardworkingnewbie 's forbearance. I do not mean this in a mocking way. You make a strong argument for removing BIND from base, and I believe it applies equally well to Sendmail.)

 

[Deleted member 59789]

Because a complete operating system does not need one. Anything beyond the base system is forcing choice on the user which is not the path of FreeBSD. Forcing a graphic system then also forces those who do not want or need one to find a way to remove it.

Indeed! I'd rather use a complete operating system as a base to tailor my systems, than use a "piecemeal system" that puts together a random kernel and userland which doesn't coherently function as a whole by design. In the end, these "piecemeal systems" lead to various superfluous forks of the same software stack after some modifications and sadly with little transference of knowledges between them.

 

[hruodr]

almost everybody does need a DNS resolver; but only a few percentage of users will have use for a domain name server. And most who are owning a domain will just use the DNS being provided by their ISP.

Then we leave there only what most people use, delete the rest. At the end will FreeBSD become the desktop system a lot of people dream of.