no default mta [was Re: Fedora Present and Future: a Fedora.next 2014 Update (Part I, “Why?”)]

[lee]

Matthew Miller <mattdm at fedoraproject.org> writes:

> On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 10:55:56AM -0700, Rick Stevens wrote:
>> Unlike others, however, I find the new system logging and analysis tools
>> cumbersome and painful to use. Having a program send an email to me if
>> it encounters issues is FAR superior to me having to plow through the
>> logs to see if it ran correctly or not.
>
> We definitely need better alerting and monitoring, mail-based or otherwise. 
> Help wanted. :)

Emails are just fine for this.  I don`t want or need some place else I
need to look at, and I don`t want to be bothered by notifications that
pop up somewhere.

Other than that, yes, some notification thing that actually works would
be nice for instances when you need it.  I had to write my own --- it`s
using libsx, for which unfortunately no Fedora package exists ...  It
should be easy to make it suitable for things otherwise sent by email.

It would seem like effort wasted on replacing something that works
great.  How about starting an MTA only on demand?  Debian had/has that
approach.


BTW, what`s the Fedora way of starting eximstats?  I haven`t really
looked into it yet, it would have to be coordinated with logrotate.  I
want that report --- by email, of course :)


FWIW:


// sxnotify.c
// This software is licensed under the GPL.
// Author: lee at yun.yagibdah.de, 2013-07-21
//
// compile with something like:
// gcc -lsx -lXpm -lXaw -lXt -lX11 -O2 -Wall -fomit-frame-pointer -finline-functions -march=native bwstat.c -o bwstat
//
// gcc -lsx -lXpm -lXaw -lXt -lX11 -march=native -O3 -finline-functions -ffast-math -fno-math-errno -funsafe-math-optimizations -ffinite-math-only -fno-signed-zeros -fsingle-precision-constant -fcx-limited-range -funroll-loops -ftracer -fvariable-expansion-in-unroller -freorder-blocks-and-partition -flto=4 -fprofile-generate
// That should compile without warnings.  Now run:
//


#include <stdio.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

#include <libsx.h>


void xx(void *data)
{
	exit(0);
}


int main(int argc, char *argv[] ) {

	if( !OpenDisplay(argc, argv) ) {
		puts("cannot open display");
		exit(1);
	}

	if(argc != 2) {
		puts("usage: sxnotify message");
		exit(1);
	}

	MakeLabel(argv[1]);
	ShowDisplay();
	int foo;
	AddTimeOut(5000, xx, (void *)(&foo));
	MainLoop();
	exit(0);
}

I took libsx from the source package Debian has.  It doesn`t compile
all the examples, but you can get the lib itself.  I wish there was a
Fedora package for it ...


Instead of making a label, you can make an editor, which would be better
for long messages --- but then, I have emacs running anyway and would
just start an emacsclient.  So you`d be looking for something that
perhaps queues the messages and waits until something to display them is
running.

So why not use emails?  Like I said, without a replacement for an MTA,
you do not have a functional system ...


-- 
Fedora release 20 (Heisenbug)