F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

[Matthew Miller]

On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 08:22:28PM +0200, Miloslav Trmač wrote:
> > What does it mean to "have available"?
> Just that.  The binary exists and does what it is expected to do.

We can do part 1. Part 2 is impossible.


> > 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".

I'm absolutely not suggesting we drop having an MTA. That would be silly.

> > 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.

Sure. So then it's just down to a matter of whether it's good to have it
installed but unconfigured. I think it isn't. I'm _certain_ that it isn't in
in @core and in the cloud use case. I can be convinced that there is some
better default configuration we can ship in the desktop case, but I'd be
surprised -- it's not like Mac users and developers are clamouring for local
mail to work. And in the server case, we're not going be able to
auto-configure anything, because the local sysadmins will _always_ want the
right local thing, which will be different -- so best to leave a blank
slate.


> 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.

Well, sure. But if we're talking about this kind of application, I think
it's entirely irrelevant to the change proposal at hand. Unless we're
planning to install your bank on eveyone's Fedora system by default. :)


-- 
Matthew Miller  ☁☁☁  Fedora Cloud Architect  ☁☁☁  <mattdm at fedoraproject.org>