Re: Too many Recommends (in particular on mail-transport-agent)
On 30 May 2017 at 07:57, Ansgar Burchardt <ansgar@debian.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> my impression is that too many packages use Recommends that should
> really be Suggests. As a random example: installing dracut as a
> initramfs provider will pull in exim4... (dracut-core Recommends: mdadm
> which Recommends: default-mta | mail-transport-agent). This seems
> really not ideal.
>
> As a result many people seem to disable installing recommended packages
> by default. I believe we should be much more agressive in downgrading
> dependencies to Suggests.
>
> For example, very few packages should Depend/Recommend a MTA: if you
> just send notifications (like mdadm), you would need a properly
> configured MTA anyway or they just end up in a file nobody will ever
> look at (I don't see local mail to root as very useful).
>
> I suggest that only very few packages should Recommend a MTA: packages
> that mainly deal with mail on servers in some way or another (for
> user-facing applications, speaking SMTP to a remote SMTP server is
> common enough that these shouldn't Recommend a MTA usually either).
Maybe exim should easily provide or default to authenticated smarthost
(satellite) configuration and /etc/aliases should be configured to
forward system mail somewhere else (eg: the sysadmin's work email, in
case of SMART or md errors)?
Alternatively, if a real MTA is too heavy, why not install msmtp-mta
by default? It (including msmtp) is only ~336K, and it's easy to set
up for authenticated SMTP. Exim4-daemon-light is ~1292KB. Maybe
these aren't easy enough to configure? Does the following need to be
revisited?: https://wiki.debian.org/Debate/DefaultMTA
Are there people who wouldn't appreciate an email from smartd or md
warning them a hard drive is about to fail or that there is something
wrong with their array? For desktops, it's way too easy to miss a
notification popup, assuming a notification system is installed...and
not all desktops have integrated smart monitoring, and not all users
install gsmartcontrol. All users should receive notification of
hardware failure, no? As I see it the issue is if an admin receives
uncountable apt-listchanges emails for something like when a great
many containers are upgraded, and it should be possible to skip
configuration (and disable) any provider of mail-transport-agent for
VMs and containers.
Cheers,
Nicholas
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