F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

[Miloslav Trmač]

On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 8:16 PM, Matthew Miller
<mattdm at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 07:37:35PM +0200, Miloslav Trmač wrote:
>> However, having the /usr/sbin/sendmail API available to applications
>> is valuable - it brings a significant system administration benefit of
>> centralizing the SMTP configuration.
>
> What does it mean to "have available"?
Just that.  The binary exists and does what it is expected to do.

> As discussed earlier, I think it's
> significantly better for applications to get errors (which they can handle)
> than to think they've sent a message which really gets buried forever.

In the case I'm thinking about, application installation instructions
just say "make sure $sendmail works" instead of "configure SMTP (and
TLS! and SMTP auth!) in this application-specific configuration file".

> And it's just not possible to automatically configure e-mail.
My claim that it is useful to have /usr/sbin/sendmail does not at all
depend on having an automatic configuration that works for everyone.

> I think the way forward is to encourage applications to _log_ rather than to
> send e-mail, via this or any other API.
Application that want to log shoud log.  Applications that want to
send e-mail should send e-mail.  My bank's monthly statement would be
rather useless in the bank's splunk archive.
    Mirek