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

[Chris Murphy]

On Jan 2, 2014, at 3:42 PM, "Lars E. Pettersson" <lars at homer.se> wrote:

> On 01/02/2014 11:31 PM, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>> Yes, all critical notifications are supposed to stay persistent.  That
>> is the right model to alert desktop users about anything relevant enough
>> to bother them with.   Not emails.
> 
> Works OK on a desktop, but how is the home server use case, where the user is not logged in on the computer, supposed to be handled?
> 
> Regarding emails. I still have not gotten any response from anyone on how to handle the output from, as an example, cron, logwatch, etc. Hopefully someone could tell how that is supposed top be taken care of now that the MTA is removed.

If you like the MTA method of being notified, install an MTA. Simple. You have been told this numerous times so don't say you haven't gotten any responses. 

> That would involve both adding to the journal, and notify the user, and/or other actions. Shouldn't that have been addressed *before* removing the MTA?


No because no one was getting messages with the MTA unless they went looking for them in the first place. And now they merely have one more step which is installing the MTA of their choice, which for a lot of Fedora users wasn't sendmail anyway.

Sendmail was taking up space on the install media, on users computers, for no benefit for the vast majority of users. I don't know how many times this has to be said - look at the number of unique individuals involved in the conversation in this thread? It's less than a dozen. So we're talking thousands of users, and less than 12 give a crap whether an MTA is installed by default or not. It's really close to zero people care about it.


Chris Murphy