<mail> command missing?

[Peter Garrett]

On Fri, 16 Dec 2005 10:53:08 +1100
David <david at kenpro.com.au> wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 13, 2005 at 03:23:39AM -0800, Mike Bird wrote:
> > On Tue, 2005-12-13 at 03:03, David wrote:
> > > I've just done my second fresh install of Breezy (both for friends). 
> > > Apparently the "mail" unix command is missing! These seems really odd. 
> > > Have I missed something obvious?
> > > 
> > > It's not available from apt and I thought it was a basic shell command.
> > > 
> > > It's still there on two other machines that I upgraded from Hoary.
> > > /usr/bin/mail
> > 
> > You'll need to install the mailx package.  It was required by
> > ubuntu-base in Hoary but dropped for Breezy.  I have no idea why.
> > 
> 
OK, clearly from the length of this thread, and the points made in it, this
is either

1) A decision made by the development team to jettison postfix/ mailx etc

OR

2) A mistake

OR

3) ?

> 
> This sounds like a bug to me, or at least some inappropriate dumbing down. 
> Does this mean that with each new release of Ubuntu we need to check what 
> has been considered inappropriate for the "average" user? 

See
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MenusRevisited

 for a flavour of some of the thinking that is being done about ... erm..
not confusing new users. 

I guess this kind of "thinking aloud" is part of the process, but some of
the suggestions on the link above make my hair stand on end <grin>

> 
> What disappears next? Terminal? rm? Everyone knows how dangerous rm is ;-)

Right - so is mv , for that matter ( and no, please don't give us
default aliases to rm -i and so on ;)
> 
> I'm really happy with Ubuntu, but that doesn't mean that everything the 
> gods of ubuntu do is correct, and  this one doesn't look good to me.
> 

Agreed - but as I said in an earlier post, we could debate the MTA/ mailx
thing forever. Seems pretty clear to me that *some* kind of local delivery
mechanism is fundamental, though.

What would be helpful, if anyone is listening (?), would be
for some member of the team to respond to this thread, and explain how
local mail was suddenly made to mysteriously disappear, and why.

What's the policy on this, guys ?

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