On 2018-07-22 04:11, Ian Zimmerman wrote:
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 qand make both available in a local
repo.mail 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
+1, this should (MUST) be a general rule.
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.
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
Really true, but it is like it is :(
On Gentoo the best way is to make your own package from your favorite
The effort for an ebuild of an individual package is usually to high.
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.
A bit more easier is to create an 'empty' virtual ebuild which at least
does nothing but tells portage the dependency is fulfilled. This can be
done in general for each unwanted dependency/package. For sure
self-compiled programs have to be installed outside of portage
controlled directories.
Alternative one can use in this particular case nail (or mailx) to
fulfil the virtual/mta dep. It doesn't listen on port(s), provides all
expected binaries and usually doesn't conflict with an individual mta.
As a side effect scripts can be written more portable.
--
Sent with eQmail-1.11 beta - a fork of the djb's famous qmail
