It would be great, if there were an *EASY* way, to make the PORTAGE_ELOG use standard unix methods (ie. /usr/sbin/sendmail) to send out mail by *ITS* *OWN*. As it is right now, people are forced to either write scripts <http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_Making_portage_use_/usr/sbin/sendmail_to_send_out_ELOG_mails> , which is bad, as it's additional work, or configure SMTP in multiple places, which is bad, as it means redundant and thus error prone work. If /usr/sbin/sendmail were used, the configuration would only have to be done at one spot, which is in the configuration of the MTA. Using /usr/sbin/sendmail would also allow to other transports than SMTP to be used. For example, UUCP or whatever could be used. It would be very useful, if /usr/sbin/sendmail were the *DEFAULT* way for PORTAGE_ELOG to send out mail. If that were done, than no further configuration might be required for people, who already have an MTA installed. I suspect that those are not just a few, as other standard tools like cron, at or quite some scripts use /usr/sbin/sendmail to send mail. Some sys-* packages even depend on an MTA to be installed, eg. sys-process/fcron. Now, I'm *NOT* advocating that Portage should DEPEND on an MTA. I'm saying, that it should use /usr/sbin/sendmail by default. If no (working) /usr/sbin/sendmail were present (like it is after a basic installation), than no mail is sent out. This would match the behaviour that's present right now in Portage - by default, no mail is sent out. But as soon as an /usr/sbin/sendmail interface were available, PORTAGE_ELOGs mailing feature might "just work"; for this, mails should, by default, be mailed to something like "portage@localhost" and the user might then redirect this alias to some other recipient in the configuration of the MTA. This means, that PORTAGE_ELOG_MAILURI wouldn't be required at all.
Already in 2.1.1 (just specify your sendmail binary instead of a smtp server).
