how about not running a full MTA on a laptop/client install... at all?
that would never be changed. So to have a full blown MTA for local delivery is overkill for a vast majority of situations. I filed a bug
It is true, but more to the point, full blown MTA can do local delivery without being started as daemons. So no MTA should be started in the default case.
With default configuration, only exim can deliver directly. Postfix and sendmail need a daemon running or a cron job to actually deliver the mail.
and exim needs perl and other massives dependencies. is there just a local delivery agent?
Peter