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

Sat Jan 4 13:12:13 UTC 2014

On 01/04/2014 03:13 AM, Chris Murphy wrote:
>
> On Jan 3, 2014, at 6:41 PM, "Lars E. Pettersson" <lars at homer.se> wrote:
>
>> On 01/04/2014 02:40 AM, Suvayu Ali wrote:
>>> What I fail to follow is, why break the existing mechanism *before* we
>>> have these other future notification mechanisms ready?
>>
>> *Exactly*
>
> Please, SNMP has been around since 1988. Gnome has had a notification system for several years at least, probably longer. If I did 10 minutes of research there are probably 1/2 dozen other notification systems out there, a few of which are reasonably mature.

What has this to do with the text you quote?

SNMP and the Gnome notification are two entirely different creatures, 
and can not be compared.

> So how long do you want for your ancient email only sending program to modernize? They haven't picked an alternative by choice. And it is their choice to not do so. It is inappropriate for Fedora to sit on its laurels waiting for every program to modernize before it makes changes the benefit most users. And it's inappropriate for Fedora to dictate these programs use some other method of notification than email.

Why should they modernize? If something been around for 30 years, well, 
then it probably has so because of a reason. Please try to do some read 
in on the subject, and perhaps you will understand this very reason.

> So *exactly* what are you two even talking about? Precisely how does waiting and doing NOTHING encourage program devs to change their notification methods? OH right, it doesn't do anything except enhance the stagnation and legitimize the non-working notification by email paradigm.

What we are talking about is compressed into the first sentence you 
quoted in this message. Please read that sentence again.

> Guess what? Presumably the programs that you use that only notify by email, do not modernize because their user base doesn't care for any other kind of notification system. In which case you will have to install an MTA to get your important messages. I don't see what's so difficult to understand.

By removing the MTA you remove functionality that exist. That you and 
others do not use this functionality does not change that fact. If you 
want top remove that functionality, you first have to change the 
applications to use some other method of communicating with the user. 
This should have be done *before* removing the MTA, as removing the MTA 
remove existing functionality. Is this too hard to comprehend?

Lars
-- 
Lars E. Pettersson <lars at homer.se>
http://www.sm6rpz.se/