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

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Mon, 06 Jan 2014 19:09:00 +0100
Ralf Corsepius <rc040203 at freenet.de> wrote:

> On 01/05/2014 02:27 AM, Chris Murphy wrote:
> >
> > On Jan 4, 2014, at 6:12 PM, Marko Vojinovic <vvmarko at gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> 
> >> But since we are bashing around about unnecessary default
> >> services, one set of services that I would actually like to see
> >> removed is the NFS stack (nfs, nfslock, portmap, ...). Arguably, a
> >> typical desktop OS with a GUI has absolutely no need of networked
> >> file systems, especially as obsolete as NFS. I've used Fedora for
> >> as long as it exists, and I've never seen anyone actually use NFS
> >> in real life scenarios on a typical desktop machine with a GUI.
> >> That's also got to be in the 99% of cases…
> 
> This only means your usage scenarios are very limited. Actually, all
> my Linux systems have been using nfs ever since Linux supports it and
> ever since I am running/administrating networks.

Ralf, apparently you missed the context here. :-) I was applying Chris'
logic to something that is not an mta.

And to apply it further, I could argue that Fedora, being a typical
desktop OS with a GUI, does not target network administrators as a
default audience. When people complained about the absence of mta in
the default install, Chris answers "just do a yum install
your-favorite-mta and be happy". So an analogous answer to you would be
"just yum install the-nfs-stack and be happy".

The point of my comment was to demonstrate that removing the mta is as
absurd as removing the nfs, sshd, or whatever other service. Devs
should not drop stuff out of the default install only on the basis of
some imaginary target audience. There will always be a target group of
people who rely on precisely that piece of functionality, and are used
to the fact that it is installed by default. The issues raised about
mta, nfs, sshd, etc. are only examples of this.

Your response wrt. nfs actually proves my point: unless there is an
obvious functionality benefit, don't break people's habits --- keep the
default as it was.

Best, :-)
Marko