date and time created 93/02/14 14:42:07 by bostic

[unix-history] / usr / src / usr.sbin / sendmail / READ_ME

/*-
 *	@(#)READ_ME	6.3 (Berkeley) %G%
 */

THIS IS AN ALPHA VERSION OF SENDMAIL.  DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT USING IT
IN A HEAVY PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT.  We've been running it (in various
forms) at Berkeley for several months, but our environment is far from
general.  In particular, it hasn't been heavily tested for non-SMTP
environments.  The good news is that most of the changes have been
Internet-related, and that has been tested.

REPORT ANY BUGS to sendmail@CS.Berkeley.EDU.

THIS IS COPYRIGHTED CODE.  BY COMPILING AND RUNNING THIS CODE YOU AGREE
to upgrade to the production release when it comes out.  You understand
that we hope this will be by March, but if there are serious problems
it may be longer than that.

The structure of this directory is:

cf		Source for Berkeley configuration files.  These are
		different than what you've seen before.  They are a
		fairly dramatic rewrite, requiring the new sendmail
		(since they use new features).
doc		Documentation.  If you are getting source, read
		op.me -- it's long, but worth it.
mail.local	Source for mail.local(8), a local delivery program.
		Older versions of sendmail called /bin/mail with a
		special -d flag to mean "really deliver this mail";
		this is a completely new (and much smaller) program
		that does absolutely nothing but deliver local mail.
		THIS IS SPECIFIC TO 4.4BSD, and is not under my
		control.
mailstats	Statistics printing program.  It has the pathname of
		sendmail.st compiled in, so if you've changed that,
		beware.  This isn't all that useful.
makemap		A program that creates the keyed maps used by the $( ... $)
		construct in sendmail.  It is primitive but effective.
		It takes a very simple input format, so you will probably
		expect to preprocess must human-convenient formats
		using sed scripts before this program will like them.
		But it should be functionally complete.
praliases	A program to print the DBM version of the aliases file.
		It hasn't been converted to understand the new Berkeley
		DB format (which we are using).
rmail		Source for rmail(8).  This is used as a delivery
		agent for for UUCP, and could presumably be used by
		other non-socket oriented mailers.  Older versions of
		rmail are probably deficient.
src		Source for the sendmail program itself.

Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons the Makefiles are for the new
Berkeley "make" and will not work on the old, traditional make.  I urge
you to get this make from Net2 (available on many public FTP archives).
Failing that, some directories have a "Makefile.dist" that will work on
older versions of make (but don't have the niceties included).

Similar comments apply to the man pages -- they use the new Berkeley
-mandoc macros instead of the -man macros.  You can get these from
Net2 as well.

IF YOU WANT TO RUN THE NEW BERKELEY DB SOFTWARE:  ****  DO NOT  ****
use the version that was on the Net2 tape -- it has a number of
nefarious bugs that were bad enough when I got them; you shouldn't have
to go through the same thing.  Instead, get a new version via public
FTP from okeeffe.CS.Berkeley.EDU, file pub/db.tar.Z.  This software
is highly recommended; it gets rid of several stupid limits, it's much
faster, and the interface is nicer to animals and plants.  You will
also probably find that you have to add -I/where/you/put/db/include
to the sendmail makefile to get db.h to work properly.