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

[Chris Murphy]

On Jan 2, 2014, at 1:03 PM, "Lars E. Pettersson" <lars at homer.se> wrote:

> On 01/02/2014 08:45 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
>> In the Fedora 19 era it was ~ 30-60 seconds according to systemd-analyze blame. There was a bug on it in the bugzilla which was blocking the "why we boot so slow" tracker for systemd. I think it's since been fixed, not sure, but now that the glory of no sendmail by default is here with Fedora 20 I don't need to think about that bug anymore.
> 
> On a Fedora 19 desktop:
> 27ms sendmail.service
> 
> How can 27 or 64 ms to start sendmail be a problem?

Like I said, it was 30-60 seconds FOR ME, consistently, except in a VM. 

> 
>> Really? In the whole world of computing you don't see this is a tiny tiny minority use case? It's so small it's not even really an edge case, it fell off the edge years ago. Even if we look at just linux derived systems, no Android system even has root enabled by default, let alone an MTA. It has a modern way of informing me of problems rather than sending me useless spam, without notifications of such.
> 
> No, loosing important mails is not a minority use case.

Clearly it is. Most users don't know about this behavior. And it's also not done at all on iOS, Android, Windows, OS X. And it's highly questionable on desktop linux whether it's done or even needed.


> 
>>> How do we solve this problem without an MTA? (cron output lost)
>> 
>> yum install sendmail?
> 
> How can we solve the problem without having, or installing, an MTA?

I'm refusing the premise that there is even a problem. 100% of all the messages I found in /var/spool/mail/root were useless. I'd have gotten more use out of a garbage bag (either empty or full).


> 
>> So you think a majority of users use cron?
> 
> You do not have cron installed and running?

No idea. Whatever is the default.



> 
>> I don't use cron. Probably in five years or so we can have a conversation on it not being installed by default.
> 
> Don't think so.

Right. And five years ago the idea of no MTA by default you'd have said the same thing. And it's been six months since this topic was discussed on devel@ and now it's being discussed AGAIN. Except not discussed because it's the exact same conversation, nothing new.

For a while now on OS X, cron is no longer used by default. This is now the job of launch services.



Chris Murphy