On 2018-07-21 23:04, Grant Edwards wrote: > Manually installing things in /usr/bin or /usr/sbin will often cause > problems because Portage assumes that it controls those directories. > > So don't do that: you should manually install things in /usr/local. > > Or, install qmail using portage, so that the system knows you have an > MTA. If you don't like the default qmail ebuild for some reason, you > can use your own. > > Or, tell Portage you have an MTA by adding an appropriate line to > /etc/portage/profie/package.provided. See portage(5). > > Or, don't use Gentoo if you don't want to do things the way Gentoo > does things.
I agree than one should not normally install hand-compiled programs in the normal directories controlled by portage. I can see how the case of MTA can tempt someone into violating that rule, though: unlike most of all other cases where a program is called by other programs, the path to /usr/sbin/sendmail is usually hardcoded, and there is no well known environment variable either (like EDITOR or PAGER). mutt has a runtime configuration option for the MTA but that's unusual. In fact, I myself am guilty of the corresponding sin on my Debian server: I want to run the latest version of my pet MTA, exim, and with the features I choose, so hand compiling is the only way. And this week it backfired on me too: I carelessly installed some package that depended on a MTA - and boom, /usr/sbin/sendmail, which had been a symlink to /opt/exim/bin/exim, was overwritten by something like nullmailer. The /usr/sbin/sendmail convention is one of the parts of Unix that, honestly, sucks. With repeated and prolonged exposure one can get irritated enough to turn Poettering :-P On Gentoo the best way is to make your own package from your favorite MTA _and_ your own virtual/mta, and make both available in a local repo. Recently I discovered dma[1] which IMHO is the _best_ lightweight MTA for client machines, so now I have a Gentoo package for it. [1] https://github.com/corecode/dma/ -- Please don't Cc: me privately on mailing lists and Usenet, if you also post the followup to the list or newsgroup. To reply privately _only_ on Usenet and on broken lists which rewrite From, fetch the TXT record for no-use.mooo.com.
