please deactivate services by default!

[Matthew Woehlke]

Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-09-24 at 19:29 -0500, Matthew Woehlke wrote:
>> Actually, working by default for things like smartctl is also really 
>> important (I'd like to know if my HD is about to go belly-up, thank 
>> you!), but at least we have the excuse that smartctl never worked nicely 
>> to begin with.
> 
> But see, it doesn't "work by default".  By default (with sendmail) mail
> is just dropped in /var/spool/mail/root.

First, I'm not talking about root's mail. Second, how does local mail 
not work? I get 'you have mail' notifications just fine (granted, bash 
isn't as obnoxious about it as it could be, i.e. it seems like some days 
I don't see a notification, but...). 'mail' is able to read and manage 
my spool. What's the problem?

This discussion prior to when I jumped in had given the impression that 
local mail would stop working. I've already expressed (numerous times) 
why I think that would be a Very Bad Thing.

> The user is given no hint, documentation, or otherwise notification
> that they may want to configure some email client to subscribe to
> this, which is quite difficult as a normal user to subscribed to
> /var/spool/mail/root.

True. However, while I agree this is a real problem, it's somewhat 
different from (though related to) the problem I'm concerned about.

-- 
Matthew
Please do not quote my e-mail address unobfuscated in message bodies.
-- 
I was recently amused by issuing 'rm -rf $KDEDIR'... from Konsole, while 
in a KDE session. And nothing bad happened whatsoever. Try THAT on 
Windows :-D.