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

[Chris Murphy]

On Jan 3, 2014, at 6:30 PM, "Lars E. Pettersson" <lars at homer.se> wrote:

> On 01/04/2014 02:10 AM, Chris Murphy wrote:
>> Exactly, it's about expectations. As an alternative OS, Fedora simply cannot depend on some 30 year old archaic user hostile way of unsuccessfully "delivering" supposedly important system messages. It's just absurd. And that cannot be fixed by somehow figuring out a way to get those emails delivered because it's a hideous way of notification anyway. I wouldn't want it to work. When I talk about the majority, I mean literally everyone using some kind of computing device.
> 
> So age is a bad thing? Why? If it has worked for 30 years, it is probably because that way of doing things has its merits.

Maybe. But at least as often or more, it's just becoming decrepit. It refuses to learn new tricks. It doesn't want to learn to write to a journal or use SNMP or Gnome desktop notification services, or anything other than emails that 9 out of 10 people are not aware of exist or read or care to be notified in that fashion.

Look the post office is shrinking because it has a product that has far far fewer use cases than before. Should it die totally? I don't know, probably not. But does it need to contract? Clearly yes. Email is a big reason why. And now there are many other ways to communicate, and abuses of email, that makes it time for email to be supplanted. Maybe not go away entirely, but for particular use cases. And this is not one of them.


> That you despise mail has nothing to do with the problem we have here.

It does because this sentiment about email's usefulness is widespread. New applications, and maturity applications with a going concern will need to adapt to this reality and pick one or maybe two newer notification methods. And perhaps someone has built something that converts email from one of these old programs into a text message, or something that generates an alert in Gnome or on Android. That would be a nice bridge between epochs, yes?

> We do have applications in Fedora that do send mail. If you are not interested in those mails, well fine, ignore them, and do something else instead, the message will still be created.

Fortunately, it's not created anymore.


> Either those applications has to be changed, to use some other sort of communication with the user, a communication that, for the user, works the same way (i.e. that the user is notified in  a similar manner, and speed, as before, but via another media).

The applications can change or not. They actually don't have to be changed. They probably should change if they want to survive though.

> 
> By removing the MTA those mails will be lost, and that has to be resolved.

Ask those application developers to use a notification system you want to use. And in the  meantime you can install an MTA. It's very simple.

You can't say the messages are important as a statement of fact because if it were a fact we'd both agree on it, as well as everyone else. That there isn't widespread agreement on the value of these emails means their importance is a matter of opinion. If a program only used email as notification for truly important messages, I would not use it.

Imagine GIMP having some error and instead of a dialog, it sent an email! Ha! Talk about ridiculous. So yes, this really is about email. If my refrigerator emailed me the door was left open, I'd burn the refrigerator to the ground in public and post a video.


> Again, this has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with loving or hating mail. It has to do with a way to inform the user that has to be handled in a manner that ensures that the user is informed.

Email hate as a lot to do with it. But more than this it has to do with people simply work differently than 20 years ago. Heck they work differently than 5 years ago. And there are new communication technologies appearing that are supplanting email even where there isn't email hate.

> 
> Am I really that bad at explaining what the problem is?

Yes because you keep suggesting the MTA shouldn't go away by default as if that solves ONE SINGLE THING. It doesn't solve anything at all. And besides it's already not installed by default so if you want it in F21 by default you need to go make the case on devel@ not here.


Chris Murphy