drop default MTA for Fedora 15

[Andrew Haley]

On 08/24/2010 12:47 PM, pbrobinson at gmail.com wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 12:43 PM, Andrew Haley <aph at redhat.com> wrote:
>> On 08/23/2010 08:15 PM, Jon Masters wrote:
>>> On Sun, 2010-08-22 at 20:10 +0200, drago01 wrote:
>>>> On Sun, Aug 22, 2010 at 7:45 PM, Rex Dieter <rdieter at math.unl.edu> wrote:
>>>>> pbrobinson at gmail.com wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> I know its been discussed in the past but there's been reasons not to
>>>>>> drop a default MTA but now that cronie (the last actual dependency)
>>>>>> has support for logging to system logs is there any reason to include
>>>>>> an MTA by default for F-14?
>>>>>
>>>>> A bit late to consider for F-14 imo (I'd argue something like should in
>>>>> place and testable by or near feature freeze), F-15 is doable.
>>>>
>>>> Test what? That no MTA is present?
>>>>
>>>> I'd  say we should stop arguing forever and just do it.
>>>
>>> What's the benefit of having no default MTA at all? Is it that Desktop
>>> users don't care about MTAs being installed? what about those of us who
>>> care more about server installations than Desktop?
>>
>> Even the web page proposing its deletion acknowledges that "The
>> presence of a Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) like sendmail has long been
>> the de facto standard."  Indeed it has: the ability to send mail from
>> a program has been an entitlement for as long as UNIX has been around.
>> In comparison with this, the benefit is very feeble: "One less
>> required package in the critical path, and we clear the way for
>> removing the MTA from the default install."
> 
> Removing it doesn't stop applications in unix from sending mail!

Yes, it does, unless you happen to have configured your machine to
be able to send mail externally.  And also, you can't guarantee that
every user ID on a machine corresponds to an email address that is
globally reachable.  I suspect that, in general, they aren't.

Andrew.