drop default MTA for Fedora 15

[Cleaver, Japheth]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: devel-bounces at lists.fedoraproject.org [mailto:devel-bounces at lists.fedoraproject.org] On Behalf
> Of pbrobinson at gmail.com
> Sent: Tuesday, August 24, 2010 3:03 PM
> To: Development discussions related to Fedora
> Subject: Re: drop default MTA for Fedora 15
> 
> On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 10:52 PM, Matthew Garrett <mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org> wrote:
> > On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 05:43:49PM -0400, seth vidal wrote:
> >
> >>  that seems like a bit of odd logic. The logs are emitted to syslog with
> >> the same thought in mind - that someone will read them - but that is
> >> also not necessarily true. But I would not want to see us discarding
> >> syslog, either.
> >
> > We have a range of utilities that perform useful syslog parsing. The
> > fact that most of them then seem to pass that output to sendmail leaves
> > me a little less convinced that anyone pays the slightest bit of
> > attention to them.
> >
> > More realistically, we install syslog because it gives us debug
> > information that we (as developers) wouldn't otherwise be able to get.
> 
> I see syslog as the equivalent of the event log in that other OS. You
> can easily view it with a basic "less /var/log/someLog" or a gui
> viewer (not sure if we install that by default) or even some
> notification method.
> 


One important distinction is the event vs report perspective. Syslog, being inherently non-transactional and unreliable, treats each incoming message as a separate event. Cron output is usually either script vomitous (which you want to see cohesively to make any sense of), or a multi-line "report" (I'm thinking logwatch). Some of us are doing nifty things parsing the mail headers (on systems with, say, nullmailer*, or something that forwards off to a smarthost), which puts us straight into the metadata+payload concept.

Syslog is great at receiving messages... but if we're getting rid of an MTA, I'd really like something local that's great at receiving (nicely formatted or not) "reports" too.


Japheth Cleaver