Reasons behind defaulting atd and sendmail

[Cameron Simpson]

On 05Sep2008 18:32, Michael Cronenworth <mike at cchtml.com> wrote:
> You continuously explain what *you* do with your system, but have yet to  
> give a wider, more useful reason for enabling sendmail and atd at 
> startup.

Gah. Wake up. It doesn't matter what one of _us_ does with our system,
it matters that the system is there at all in a functional sense.

UNIX is a multiprocess system. _Any_ system process may wish to schedule
an activity for later, or report on stuff by email. atd and sendmail
are the standard way these things are done on UNIX. If they are not
there, things will not work. The pretty Gnomic scheduley thing uses cron
underneath. Cron reports by sendmail! Because it should not need
anything else, and if you disable it at boot it needs something else!
That's really stupid.

Thunderbird is in many ways a slightly broken app in that it requires the
user to configure mail dispatch. Mail dispatch is a _general_ facility,
used be every facility on the system, and every user. You configure it
once for the system, not once per user, per app! That's insane.

Configuring mail is a _system_ thing, just like configuring the clock
and configuring the network. It is _not_ an "app" or "user" thing.

atd should live, so anything can schedule one off tasks, just like crond
should be live so anything can schedule repeating tasks and
sendmail/postfix/qmail/whatever should be live so anything can send email,
just like the X11 server should be live so you can run your apps and live the
kernel should be live so it can all work.

atd and sendmail are basic services. Just because _you_ don't realise or
understand that _everything_ should be able to expect their presence
doesn't mean they shouldn't be there.
-- 
Cameron Simpson <cs at zip.com.au> DoD#743
http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/

Do you think that you're right and I'm wrong?  How naive if you do...
        - DPERLE at delphi.com