Re: [gentoo-user] Heads up: Gentoo fouls up mail transport agent.

[Mike Gilbert <floppym@gentoo.org>]

On Sat, Jul 21, 2018 at 5:03 PM, Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> wrote:
> Hello, Gentoo.
>
> Right at the moment, I feel a lot of sympathy with Alan Grimes, and need
> a lot of restraint in avoiding the use of swear words in describing some
> Gentoo developer.
>
> ...
>
> nullmailer installs a file /usr/sbin/sendmail.  This masks out the
> correct /usr/bin/sendmail (which is a symbolic link to s/qmail, which I
> installed by hand, not using emerge) because /usr/sbin is before
> /usr/bin in $PATH.
>
> ...
>
> But what's the proper method to tell my gentoo system that I don't want
> crud like nullmailer installed?  How can I guard myself against such
> presumptiousness on the part of the Gentoo devs in the future?

You must have installed a package that depends on virtual/mta,
presumably because it needs to send emails. Had you installed qmail
using portage, the virtual/mta dep would have been satisfied by it,
and nullmailer would not have been installed in the first place.
However, you didn't do that, and so portage had no idea qmail was
installed.

A possible workaround would be to add mail-mta/netqmail to
package.provided on your system. However, there's still no guarantee
that your custom-built qmail software will work with other packages
provided by Gentoo.

Regarding your accusations: Gentoo developers cannot anticipate every
possible thing you might do on your system, especially when you start
installing custom programs in paths that are traditionally managed by
our package manager. Using portage you can customize your system
extensively, without needing to custom build your own software. If
that's not good enough for you, go build a Linux from Scratch system
and enjoy the lack of any package management or support whatsoever.