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

[Ralf Corsepius]

On 01/04/2014 09:45 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
>
> On Jan 3, 2014, at 11:24 PM, David G. Miller <dave at davenjudy.org> wrote:
>>
>> This is as close as I can get to the "end" of this discussion since I get
>> the digest so it will have to do.  I've seen you claim over and over that
>> "no one" uses e-mail for system notifications.
>
> It's hyperbole for me to say "no one" because it's clearly not meant to be literal. But it's true that from a high altitude perspective, it's in the realm of 99%.
No. IMO, this is just a defect of RH/Fedora based and other Linux 
distros. They have not been able to provide a proper, out-of-the-box 
configuration.

If they had done so, everybody was using it.

>>   This is the exact opposite
>> of my experience (30+ years with computers, 25+ years with Unix systems and
>> 15+ years with Linux including currently working as a Linux/Unix engineer).
>
>> Do you have *ANY* independently verifiable numbers to back up your claim?
>
> Yes it's called observation. Windows doesn't inform users of problems by email since never. OS X likewise, in effect has never done this because root was disabled, even though postfix is installed by default even to this day. iOS and Android never have either.

Apples and oranges. Correct, most of these OSes do not support this 
feature, primarily because these OSes have been designed as 
single-seat/single-users OSes and did not take multi-user/network-wide 
system-management into account.

> Restricting the context to just Fedora, by default it is a desktop OS with a GUI.
That's what some people around here want to make it. However this is 
*not* what Linux is, nor is it what I want it to be.

If I'd wanted it to be ... I'd buy and use iOS, Windows or similar.

> And in fact, that's not how it behaves, the user is properly informed of important messages via alerts in gnome-shell (and presumably on KDE), for things like SELinux alerts, crashes, and degraded raid arrays (via udisks). So in fact this is working rather like I expect, whether it's Fedora 19 or Fedora 20. By default I don't have to configure anything to be informed of urgent issues.
Again, this is the single-user school of thinking, which is 
inappropriate for multi-user/mult-seat system.

> The alerts that appear in gnome-shell that I've seen have always been for non-obvious problems that needed attention like a dead hard drive in an array and the system kept on working normally otherwise, as it should in degraded mode.
I think gnome-alerts (and other desktop) notifications are a broken 
design - Why? They are inappropriate in everything else but a 
"personal-single-user" system. Think about non-IT personnel being 
notified in a corporite network environment.