Re: default MTA
Hi Simon,
On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 01:05:24PM +0100, Simon McVittie wrote:
> The participants in this thread are debian-devel subscribers: the sort
> of people who know that Debian is a Unix system, know what a Unix system
> is, and have some idea of what a "btrfs scrub cron job", or indeed an
> MTA, means. That's a pretty limiting audience for an operating system.
> The Universal Operating System should also be usable by people who don't
> meet those criteria, and I think Joss is right to speak up on their behalf.
I think the problem is that Aunt Tilly will stumble across packages which
expect a working sendmail whether or not they are ready for them: they'll read
advice suggesting they should have smartd/smartmontools running; or they'll
install some other semi-random Debian package after performing a search for a
tool to solve a specific task, which supposes that mail works. We were all
Aunt Tillys, once, and I certainly had this experience (although in my day
everyone faced the exim3 configuration stuff on a fresh install. Not that I'm
advocating that for a minute.)
Such novices may well have no idea what cron or at are, but once they begin
reading around to try and solve problems like scheduling things, they'll
soon stumble across them.
To address this problem, I think we have to either adjust all packages which
expect a working sendmail to use some other universal local messaging system or
better configure the system (including the desktop) to handle local mail, as
Adam suggests. I don't think the former solution is viable, not least because
there is no alternative, universal local messaging system to switch to.
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