Re: 23.0.60; emacs-report-bug fails silently

[Florian Beck <abstraktion@t-online.de>]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

>>>> Look, if you think my setup is bizzare, please ignore my report. But
>>>> I don't think it is.
>>> Me neither, see the sub-thread[1] about this in April on emacs-devel.
>> Well, /usr/sbin/sendmail indeed *does* exist on my system, although the
>> sendmail package is not installed.  Confusing, isn't it?
>
> Not necessarily: many packages (i.e. most MTAs) provide
> /usr/sbin/sendmail.  Could you try and figure out what that
> `/usr/sbin/sendmail' is?

It is from the postfix package, but obviously not configured:

fb@aeschylus:~$ sendmail
sendmail: fatal: open /etc/postfix/main.cf: No such file or directory
fb@aeschylus:~$ echo $?
75


>
>> Anyway, because the sendmail binary does exist,
>> message-send-mail-function returns message-send-mail-with-sendmail.
>> So that would not help.
>
> We definitely have a problem in this respect.  Traditionally on Unix,
> sending mail is done via the /usr/sbin/sendmail program, but nowadays
> it's very common to have such programs completely misconfigured.
> It's fundamentally a bug in the distributions, I believe, but it's not
> one that we can expect to see fixed any time soon, so we're going to
> have to deal with it.
>
>         Stefan

As a test, I installed sendmail from the ubuntu repository. It kind of
works, but only delivers mail locally. Of course, now sendmail returns
0. So a misconfigured sendmail may be difficult to detect.

-- 
Florian Beck