[PATCH 0 of 2] add the template keyword 'children'

[Julian Cowley]

On Fri, 23 Jul 2010, Mads Kiilerich wrote:
>  Martin Geisler wrote, On 07/23/2010 12:40 AM:
> > > I don't think trying to detect SMTP settings would be of much help. I
> > > guess that most users will use webmail or connect to a remote
> > > imap/pop3/smtp server anyway.
> > It is that remote SMTP server that I figured we can get hold of.
> 
> It is a configuration of the users mail application, not a system setting, so
> I doubt that it is feasible to retrieve anything usable there. YMMV.
> 
> > > Improved support for keyring or
> > > http://mercurial.selenic.com/bts/issue2141 could perhaps help more. A
> > > default configuration for gmail (and others?) could perhaps also help.
> > > And perhaps also a configuration for connecting (unauthenticated)
> > > directly to waste.org?
> > Ehm, no... we cannot operate an unauthenticated SMTP relay, if that is
> > what you are suggesting?
> 
> Agreed, open relays are so 80ies.
> 
> But "all" mail servers accepts unauthenticated smtp for local destinations.
> That is also technology from the 80ies, but it is unfortunately still used for
> mail delivery.
> 
> waste.org accepts mail for mercurial-devel at selenic.com. IIRC it uses
> greylisting, but I don't know if it also uses "dial-up" blacklisting or other
> too-smart-for-this-hack anti-spam measures. A configuration for sending
> directly to waste.org could thus perhaps solve the problem users might have
> sending patches to Mercurial. It would however not be a general solution for
> sending patches elsewhere.
> 
> /Mads

On Unix/Linux, the best way to send mail if you are unconcerned
with or don't know what the mail settings should be is to use
/usr/sbin/sendmail.  This is very easy to configure in an hgrc:

    [email]
    method = /usr/sbin/sendmail

BTW, that is straight out of the man page for hgrc.

This way, you are giving all of the responsibilities for handling
mail to a program that the user or the system has probably already
configured to correctly send mail.  Let it deal with what SMTP server
to send to, whether it needs authentication or not, or whether it
needs to requeue mail in the face of greylisting.

For instance, on every Mac (the system this originally came up on),
there is a working postfix system that handles mail right out of
the box.

Perhaps using /usr/sbin/sendmail should be the default, at least
on Unix/Linux/Mac systems.  The path name is used on all of the
systems I've been exposed to (Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc.).
The only one I've seen different (about 15 years ago) is SunOS 4,
which used /usr/lib/sendmail.

The only other reasonable default I can think of is to try using SMTP
to localhost.