Re: 23.0.60; emacs-report-bug fails silently

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

>>>>> 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

Good, so this one is not misconfigured.  We should be able to DTRT here.

>> 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.

> 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.

I.e. it's broken and misconfigured.

> So a misconfigured sendmail may be difficult to detect.

Yes.  But clearly we're not even doing the right when sendmail fails
cleanly, so there's room for improvement.


        Stefan