Announcing Fedora 12 Alpha

Michal Jaegermann michal at harddata.com
Thu Aug 27 21:09:21 UTC 2009


On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 10:08:13PM +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> On 08/27/2009 09:43 PM, Chris Adams wrote:
> > Once upon a time, Rahul Sundaram <sundaram at fedoraproject.org> said:
> >> Anyway a feature proposal has been made at
> >>
> >> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/NoMTA
> > 
> > "Delete and ignore the messages" seems like a bad idea; typically, only
> > error messages come from cron jobs, so dropping the output is bad.
> > Ignoring errors is a recipie for later problems.
> 
> What problem would that be, really? People keep claiming that without
> adding any details.

As shocking as it may be to you there are still around people with
computers who care about their data and about machines which do not
misbehave without warnings.  So messages, say, from smartd or mdadm
or other things that something goes haywire are in such situations
rather appreciated.  logwatch also has some uses (even if it need
some care sometimes). Also error output from cron, where no tty
and/or console is available, is something good to know.  Maybe your
cron scripts are always perfect but I managed to screw up from time
to time (most often forgetting that PATH in cron will be not the
same like the one for an interactive shell).  Sending that in some
or another form to some desktop is not enough.

Reinstalling a system from scratch is usually a quick job; restoring
local customizations could be a substantial bother; users data is
something really important.  Yes, backups is also a good thing.

> "Required changes:
> 
>    1. Change any cron job that emits output to send its output to syslog
> or a log file

So now you claim that people who cannot be bothered with looking at
mail will go and dig through log files?  I would like to see that.
Or maybe logwatch will do that for them but then what it will happen
with a collected information?

   
>    2. Remove Requires: /usr/sbin/sendmail from cronie's spec file "

MTA is needed by more things that one particular daemon.  Sure, if
you have something minimal for a local delivery which can replace
existing alternatives then I do not see a problem; only would like
to see that "something" first.

   Michal




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