drop default MTA for Fedora 15

[Matthew Garrett]

On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 08:56:21AM -0500, Chris Adams wrote:

> They can't be configured that way; they don't implement SMTP.  It is a
> de-facto standard for Unix programs to send mail by piping the message
> to either /bin/mail or /usr/{sbin,lib}/sendmail.  That has the advantage
> of queueing for later delivery (what if I'm off-line when mdmonitor
> detects a failure?) and such.

The problem with delivering this to a user's mailbox via an MTA is that 
in the typical case it doesn't result in the user noticing anything 
until they've logged in as root and find out that the "you have new 
mail" message actually means "Your RAID is fucked" and not just "Here's 
some random syslog spew that something you installed and forgot about 
keeps generating". If the question is "How do I ensure that important 
system messages get delivered to someone who can do something about them 
in a timely manner", a local MTA isn't a great answer.

There's certainly a set of people who want an MTA for this - in a server 
environment it's obviously far more straightforward to get mailed on 
failure, and that's something that you'll probably configure when 
setting up the machine in the first place. But we're talking about the 
default install case, and right now the situation is that anything that 
pipes directly to sendmail is almost certainly never being read by the 
user. Having an MTA installed doesn't solve the problem that we want to 
solve, and so dropping an MTA from the default install means a reduction 
in the quantity of privileged code running on the system without any 
significant reduction in functionality.

The long term fix would arguably be to provide a stub /usr/sbin/sendmail 
that ties into a more generic event reporting interface, which in turn 
could be configured to send mail elsewhere but would default to popping 
up some sort of desktop notification.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org