F20 - Unintended consequences of no default MTA - How best to fix

[Chris Murphy]

On Jan 2, 2014, at 11:45 AM, "Lars E. Pettersson" <lars at homer.se> wrote:

> On 01/02/2014 07:30 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
>> There is no deficiency in omitting the installation of something that does nothing by default. To gain functionality from sendmail required the user configure it.
> 
> It delivers mail, so it certainly does something. It is not an idle process doing nothing.

I've never seen it do anything since I started using Fedora, except cause longer boot times.


>> Since the user needs to know enough to configure it, for it to do anything useful, there's no meaningful problem with requiring users who were going to have to configure one anyway to now install it.
> 
> A user only needs to know how to edit /etc/aliases, i.e. add a line 'root: <username>' to it, run newaliases (or something in the line of my proposal earlier), and to setup the mail client to read that mail. Not more esoteric than to setup ordinary mail.

It's a minority use case. This has already been discussed ad nauseum back in July on the devel list. Is there something there that was not brought up that clearly makes the decision wrong? If so, it needs to be brought up on devel. I don't see the point in having the exact same arguments all over again.

> Not having a MTA leads to lost mail, this has to be addressed and solved before the MTA is removed.

Presumably if it's that important, an error is generated due to the lack of an MTA? If not, then it's not important. If ithere is an error, then at least it's being logged somewhere where it might be seen, rather than the sendmail by default case which is the silent accumulation of emails in /var/spool/mail/root that most users have *no idea* is happening, and even if you managed to inform a majority of users this is happening, the majority (like me) still have no idea how to retrieve, redirect, or stop them from being unnecessarily generated.


Chris Murphy