On Thu, 2010 Jul 15 22:41+0200, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote: > > Why do you find exim4 inappropriate for a minimal install?
* Users may not want a full MTA installed in the first place. (Same argument as to why Apache/ProFTPD/NTPD/Bind/etc. are not appropriate for a minimal install.) * As a full-featured mail queue, it is not trivial to configure and administer. (E.g. what if a message is stuck in the queue?) * By the same token: security implications. Why take the risk for something that isn't broadly needed by users? * Due to its large footprint (including the creation of a dedicated user account), removing it is prone to be less clean than removing a simple package. (Some users in the linked discussions were complaining about Exim-related cruft in /var sticking around.) * A minimal squeeze install has the following user-space daemons running: udevd, dhclient3, rsyslogd, acpid, cron (and if you care to count them, init and getty). It's a stretch to consider exim in the same tier as these. * A minimal system should, in theory, be a core to which you add desired features, not something from which you remove undesired ones. It's one thing if you don't care to have e.g. vi installed, because the package is inert if you don't use it (aside from taking up a trivial amount of disk space). But a daemon that starts at boot time, with all the issues previously noted, is quite another. > This can be verified by running 'aptitude why exim4' in the > installed system. # aptitude why exim4 i cron Recommends exim4 | postfix | mail-transport-agent This is after having removed the exim4* packages, however, so it may not be accurate. > I suspect the change you propose can not be implemented by debian- > installer, but instead would have to be done by changing cron or any > other package pulling in the mta package. At least the way d-i is > designed at the moment. Why would that be necessary? If a package that Provides: mail-transport- agent is installed before or simultaneously with cron (or whichever other package has the dependency), the dependency will already have been satisfied and exim4 won't get pulled in. On Thu, 2010 Jul 15 22:41+0200, Frans Pop wrote: > > How exactly did you determine this? I doubt it is cron as Recommends > are not installed during base system installation (debootstrap). Admittedly, I went on what was said in the online discussions. > The only correct way to check what pulls exim in is to check the > syslog for the installation. Please send a (gzipped!) copy (you can > find it on the installed system in /var/log/installer). Of course; it is attached. Looking at that, it doesn't appear that cron is responsible for pulling in exim4*; cron is installed much earlier in the process. heirloom-mailx is installed at the same time as exim4*, but that one only Suggests: exim4. It seems possible that d-i is installing exim4 explicitly.
var-log-installer-syslog.txt.gz
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