Announcing Fedora 12 Alpha

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, Michael Cronenworth <mike at cchtml.com> said:
> On 08/26/2009 05:24 PM, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> >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.
> 
> I've brought this fact up a year or so ago and my e-mail was swept under 
> the rug. I suspect this thread will also be forgotten about and the 
> issue will resurface in F13>F14>etc.

I doubt it was "swept under the rug."  Did you provide a solution that
was ignored?

The problem:

- some daemons may generate output that needs to be displayed to the
  user; this output should be stored somewhere if it can't be displayed
  to the user immediately, or if there is a designated admin user and
  another user is logged in

The current solution:

- send email to root, using a local MTA that can handle local delivery
  (sendmail is the current default for historical reasons, postfix and
  exim should also work)

Every time this comes up (and it has come up repeatedly), the end result
is that there's no compelling reason to switch between MTAs in the
default install, since the current default works as expected.  End users
that actually want to configure an MTA are free to install what they
want.  The other possibility (ssmtp) is not a solution to the above
problem, since it can't deliver locally (which is the only sane default
out-of-the-box).

The only reason to change is if there is a better solution to the above
problem than "email root".  However, despite people saying that is a bad
solution, there hasn't been anybody step up and implement a better
solution.

Me, I just keep using sendmail because it's what I know (I've been
managing mail servers for 13+ years).  The cool thing about sendmail is
that, once you learn it, you can make it do just about anything, without
having to change any source code (the configuration syntax is really a
basic programming language).

I understand that the vast majority of people can't do that, but the
postfix/exim people need to also understand that the vast majority of
Fedora users/"admins" can't configure postfix or exim either, except by
Google-cut-and-paste (which works just as well or as poorly for any MTA
that an end-user doesn't really understand).  I don't think there are
any system-config-MTA (for any of the available MTAs) configuration
tools in Fedora.

-- 
Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.