Reasons for ikeeping an MTA (was Re: Ubuntu is under attack)

[Peter Garrett]

On Tue, 20 Dec 2005 11:48:08 -0400
Derek Broughton <news at pointerstop.ca> wrote:

> Some have said that we don't need an MTA _just_ for cron, but the fact is
> that cron is one specific app that _is_ installed and needs to be able to
> send mail.  Any app that needs to send mail also needs to either force a
> dependency on _an_ MTA or have an alternative method of notifying a user. 
> The real error here is that cron can be installed in such a way that it
> _doesn't_ provide any notification.  If that's fixed in a way that doesn't
> involve an MTA some people are going to be annoyed, but it would at least
> be consistent.

This is exactly right. All the discussion about "postfix is not installed
by default" misses the point that Derek is making. There needs to be a
mechanism for cron to pass on its messages. 

I installed postfix and mailx because I needed to know what the heck cron
was doing. If there was another way, it should have been implemented. It
evidently was not - with the result that the users list is now inundated
with posts, some of which are just noise, but some of which make very
valid points, IMO.

I would hope that the development team is sensible enough to read the
symptoms, and re-examine the functionality concerned. I'm starting to think
that all we are going to see is a defence of the staus quo. If that is
what happens, Ubuntu is going to lose important parts of its community -
people who believed that Ubuntu was wanting to be responsive to the
concerns of its users.

I rarely post to this list, because I'm not a developer, and I understand
that noise should be kept to a minimum here. I'm concerned that so far I
haven't seen anyone admit that a problem exists, and needs fixing.

Sincerely,

Peter

 -- Unix is hard to learn. The process of learning it is one of multiple
small epiphanies. -- Neal Stephenson