F20 - Unintended consequences of no default MTA - How best to fix

[Chris Murphy]

On Jan 3, 2014, at 1:31 PM, Suvayu Ali <fatkasuvayu+linux at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Jan 03, 2014 at 07:27:05PM +0000, Tom H wrote:
>> On Fri, Jan 3, 2014 at 3:05 AM, Suvayu Ali <fatkasuvayu+linux at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Thu, Jan 02, 2014 at 01:37:28PM -0700, Chris Murphy wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> Clearly it is. Most users don't know about this behavior. And it's
>>>> also not done at all on iOS, Android, Windows, OS X. And it's highly
>>>> questionable on desktop linux whether it's done or even needed.
>>> 
>>> I do not understand your comparison with iOS, OS X, Windows, etc. We
>>> are not in a race with any of them. We simply want an operating system
>>> that is free (open) and lets us be in control of our computing needs.
>> 
>> It's a question of looking at what others in this space are doing and
>> evaluating whether their features are appropriate for Fedora and what
>> their users are used and expect. Fedora users (and Linux users in
>> general) most probably use Windows or OS X at work and own an Android
>> or iOS phone, so diverging from them, especially when it comes to some
>> geeky log retrieval mechanism, isn't in the best interest of Fedora.
> 
> Why do they have to be the same?  If I wanted what either of those OSes
> offer, I would be using them, not Fedora.  I do not understand why my
> choices have to be minor variations of each other instead of distinctly
> different based on needs.

Guess what you can yum install <mtaofchoice> and get your user choice. Forcing the default installation of something most people do not make use of is NOT a valid F/OSS argument. The valid argument is that you do have the choice to install it, whereas on OS X when Apple changes things, I often don't have a choice.

So why do I  use it? Because some closed applications I need to use for work are only available on it or Windows and I prefer OS X despite how much more closed it is, these days sometimes even more closed than Windows is. So that's a nice lesson that closed vs open isn't a good metric for success. And yes a distro must be successful to survive, there's a critical mass needed for it to be viable. And Fedora is one of the most adaptive distros out there, intentionally. That means constant changes.

Now there will be some additional users talking to upstream developers to incorporate better means of notification rather than depending on emails that obviously aren't being seen by most peopel anyway, but now with Fedora 20 they aren't there by default either. Like using SNMP for smartd rather than emails.



Chris Murphy