[xubuntu-users] fresh installation does not report cron errors: no MTA installed

[Wybo]

On 2014-05-04 18:09, Peter Flynn wrote:
> On 05/04/2014 03:26 PM, Wybo wrote:
>> I just did a fresh install of trusty and deliberately made a failing
>> entry in the crontab:
>>
>> * * * * * mkdir /qwer/qwer
>>
>> In /var/syslog, this results in:
>>
>> May  4 16:04:01 dekker CRON[2395]: (root) CMD (mkdir /qwer/qwer)
>> May  4 16:04:01 dekker CRON[2394]: (CRON) info (No MTA installed,
>> discarding output)
>
> This is because a cron error results in sending mail to the owner, and
> there is no Mail Transfer Agent installed.
>
>> When I look in the documentation
>> (https://help.ubuntu.com/14.04/installation-guide/amd64/ch08s05.html),
>> it says:
>>
>>     For this reason the packages exim4 and mutt will be installed by
>>     default (provided you did not unselect the “standard” task during
>>     the installation). exim4 is a combination MTA/MDA that is relatively
>>     small but very flexible. By default it will be configured to only
>>     handle e-mail local to the system itself and e-mails addressed to
>>     the system administrator (root account) will be delivered to the
>>     regular user account created during the installation.
>>
>> Still, mutt and exim4 appear not to be installed, although I did not
>> exclude or remove any packages. Is this a bug?
>
> If you did not unselect the "standard" task, then it certainly looks
> like an error.

So I suppose Iĺl have to report this as a bug? But how? I normally 
report bugs with ubuntu-bug, but that asks me to assign the bug to a 
package...

> WARNING: installing mutt may force it to be the default system MUA,
> which means that clicking on a mailto: link in your browser will run
> mutt, which may not be the MUA you want if you normally use Thunderbird,
> Evolution, or something else. Unsetting this is virtually impossible, as
> the config for xda seems to ignore all other settings.

I don't understand this: according to 
https://help.ubuntu.com/14.04/installation-guide/amd64/ch08s05.html mutt 
should have been installed automatically, and Thunderbird is also 
installed automatically. Do you mean that xubuntu should install two 
incompatible packages?

> ///Peter
>