On Sat 08 Mar 2014 at 09:25:54 +0000, Joe wrote: > It is still a bit of a scary question for new users, and although the > dialog box tries to say something along the lines of 'if you don't know > what this means, don't worry about it', it doesn't succeed very well. > And no, I can't think of a short, good explanation of domains to put > here, either.
You characterise the d-i domain question well. Fortunately, it doesn't matter for 99% of users if the response is empty or a name (example.com) is made up. For the other 1% it will depend on what some of their software does with the 127.0.1.1 line in /etc/hosts. With a hostname of debian and no domain name /etc/hosts is 127.0.1.1 debian Exim4 (and, I believe, postfix) will have an /etc/mailname with the line debian With a domain name of example.com the line in /etc/mailname is 127.0.1.1 debian.example.com debian and in /etc/mailname it is debian.example.com What is in /etc/mailname is used by exim4 to qualify addresses without anything after the @. Neither debian nor debian.example.com route so sending and/or receiving mail could be problematic. However, most users have an MUA which uses an ISP smarthost to send, so the problem is not encountered. Even using localhost:25 the MUA takes care of the from address, so again the problem is not seen. Exim4 will also HELO/EHLO with debian or debian.example.com but most ISPs accept any old rubbish for that. All in all d-i does a reasonable job in the domain name question section. Presumably anyone requiring bells and whistles will deal with it after the install. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/20140308135906.gp8...@copernicus.demon.co.uk
