We need a new subject- bug fixes

Rahul Sundaram sundaram at fedoraproject.org
Sun Mar 4 22:33:04 UTC 2007


Les Mikesell wrote:
> Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> 
>>
>>> OpenOffice is the particular thing I had in mind, but I suspect there 
>>> are others.  I'm not talking about additional packages - this is in 
>>> reference to your comment about not deviating from upstream.
>>
>> Again probably licensing reasons.
> 
> Licensing as in it is illegal to redistribute the upstream version, or 
> licensing as in someone arbitrarily doesn't like or agree with the license?

Well defined package licensing guidelines for Fedora. Fedora includes 
only Free and open source software. Fedora clearly advertises this fact.

>> I made no absolute statements that no packages ever deviate. I said 
>> that Fedora packages generally avoid patches and I stand by that.
> 
> Hence my comment that it deviates when it suits their fancy to deviate.

"fancy" would mean as the package maintainer wishes without any 
consideration to the effects.  They are deliberate well defined reasons 
for patches as I have already clearly explained for each of the 
instances cited. Nobody does the additional work of putting in patches 
unnecessarily by design.

> That would apply to all network services, yet none of the others are 
> handled this way.

What applies to sendmail doesnt apply necessarily to all network 
services. Sendmail has a configuration that provides the option to 
connect to localhost or network. If there are other network services 
that provides this, it might be suitable to configure it by default to 
connect only to the local host. We cant blindly generalize that. Many 
package changes are context sensitive.

>  > I dont see how this is
>> breaking any functionality since this is a well documented 
>> configuration change for security reasons.
> 
> Documented as in 'man sendmail' where you expect to find documentation? 

It is documented directly within the configuration file.

>  How can removing network access from a network mail transport not break 
> functionality?

Sendmail is just a mail transfer agent. It can deliver mails both 
locally as well for a network. In Fedora, it is configured to deliver 
mail locally by default. You claimed that it is difficult to bring back 
that functionality which is just not true.

>  > What exactly are you suggesting?
> 
> That the distribution sendmail configuration is handled entirely 
> differently than all the other services that have distribution-specific 
> and fairly systematic ways to activate them.  It's not only different 
> from upstream, it's different from every other fedora packaging 
> modification in not moving the distro-specific changes under 
> /etc/sysconfig and providing a config program to control it easily.

Check upstream defaults before claiming that there is a difference 
again. /etc/sysconfig serves a entirely different purpose. It is there 
to separate changes where the configuration is otherwise directly modify 
the init script which would conflict with updates using rpm.  There is 
no configuration program required to change this simple thing. For the 
record, these are steps to configure sendmail to connect to a external 
network.

    1. Edit /etc/mail/sendmail.mc and either change the DAEMON_OPTIONS 
line to also listen on network devices, or comment out this option 
entirely using the dnl comment delimiter.

    2. Install the sendmail-cf package:

             yum install sendmail-cf

    3. Regenerate /etc/mail/sendmail.cf:

             make -C /etc/mail

Rahul




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