On 2017-07-07 02:06 -0500, Dave Sherohman wrote:
> What was the reason for omitting mailutils (and, specifically, a
> functional /usr/bin/mail binary) from the default strech install?
For the record, mailutils have never been part of a default install, but
bsd-mailx (which also provides /usr/bin/mail) was until Jessie.
> That's kind of a standard thing to be there on *nix systems...
For better or worse, a default Debian installation seems to not omit
various programs that have been standard on Unix systems. There are
certainly reasons for that, and I don't think many people use
/usr/bin/mail to send or read mail these days.
> (Yes, I've just spent the last couple days wondering why a couple new
> stretch servers I set up were mailing some of their reports, but not
> others, and finally noticed the "/usr/bin/mail: not found" errors
> associated with the missing reports.)
Packages using /usr/bin/mail to send reports should depend on, or at
least recommend, bsd-mailx | mailx. There is also the problem that some
Recommends are missing in the base install due to debootstrap
limitations[1], this includes logrotate's Recommends on bsd-mailx.
Cheers,
Sven
1. https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2017/06/msg01040.html
