Announcing Fedora 12 Alpha

[Kevin Fenzi]

On Thu, 27 Aug 2009 03:54:00 +0530
Rahul Sundaram <sundaram at fedoraproject.org> wrote:

> On 08/27/2009 03:13 AM, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> 
> > Then IMHO the solution is to get this information to the user via
> > some other method so we don't require a MTA in the first place, not
> > replace it with something that silently drops the email under the
> > rug. 
> 
> What are those mails and why should I care about them as a desktop
> user? They are for all practical purposes under the rug already.

Out of the box? Not much. If they provide no value, why don't we
disable them? 

On the other hand if you have a friend or read from a howto how to
setup a backup cron job and it starts failing after a while, it would
sure be nice to get those emails before you need to use your backups. 

I think changing something like this that has behaved this way since
cron existed needs: a) loud trumpeting b) assurance that if the data is
not in an email, it is _somewhere_ for people expecting it to exist. 

> > I think despite that many people won't care about this or need it it
> > would be very very anoying for us to change it so this doesn't work
> > without fixing the delivery in the first place. 
> 
> If you know enough to care, you are likely not going to be reading the
> mails directly as root user but reconfiguring to send mails to the
> email account of choice and a single package to flip over is hardly
> going to take a few mins. If you are doing it for more than one
> system, kickstart is going to take care of them. The people who are
> going to be doing this just have to accept that the majority is going
> to benefit from not running a mta and the tradeoff has to favor them
> instead.

But why can't we fix it at the 'needs an mta' step instead of 'we
generate emails no one cares about and sometimes silently drop them' ?

The solution of ssmtp seems a band aid to me, that will also annoy some
people who don't expect it's behavior. 

> > Perhaps as an easy step, cron (or cronnie or whatever) could just
> > write this stuff to a log? 
> 
> Yeah, anything is better than what we have now which is just very sub
> optimal for everyone involved.

Sure, so possible solutions IMHO: 

- cron uses a /var/log/cron/ whatever log file area for it's output. 

- logwatch not enabled by default? 

or

- Some mta that has simple local delivery ability

or 

- Some way to take cron output and stuff it into a rss feed or
  something thats available from a System Admin menu. 

or

Something else here thats not 'use ssmtp'. 

:)

kevin
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