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

[Chris Murphy]

On Jan 5, 2014, at 2:31 AM, Ralf Corsepius <rc040203 at freenet.de> wrote:
>> 
> 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.

So this long running defect is just *itching* to be fixed so badly that the decision to drop installing an MTA by default was about to happen on the precipice of a proper OOB configuration implementation being ready for wide spread deployment?

> 
> 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.

Windows has been designed for multi-user for over a decade, its origin as single user isn't relevant. While OS X has been multi-user since the before it was called OS X. This (factually incorrect) distinction is orthogonal to how humans prefer to be notified of problems, and what resources they're going to dedicate to configure it into the *existing* manner in which they work.

> 
>> 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.

Make it? It's been this way for what a decade? If anything it could be about to change in the direction you want with Fedora.next if the Server WG decides an MTA by default makes sense. Desktop? Good riddance. Cloud/VM? They get configured and then don't get logged into at all in normal operation. Why would I want the equivalent of something dating back to ants encased in amber? All of those VM MTAs to configure for non-local mail delivery is the easy part. The worst part is having VM's email me.

> However this is *not* what Linux is, nor is it what I want it to be.

And this is what's so great about F/OSS, you get to yum install <mta> or whatever you want to make it whatever you want.

> 
>> 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.

It is one example, that is somewhat desktop biased, of a notification method better than emails. For server/cloud, if you were to argue that nagios (or other), should be installed by default, I might be inclined to agree. I suspect those WGs would be willing to look into it. But I don't know how that's going to end up working in terms of yum/dnf packaging. Maybe they all will share some core/base whatever it will be called, and then they'll become differentiated using package groups. *shrug*

Chris Murphy