An MTA should be installed by ubuntu (was [ubuntu-users] Re: Ubuntu is under attack)

[Jan Moren]

tis 2005-12-20 klockan 19:54 +1300 skrev Tim Frost:
> ** Cross-=posted to ubuntu-devel as well as ubuntu-users.
> 
> On Mon, 2005-12-19 at 20:42 -0800, Mike Bird wrote:
> > On Mon, 2005-12-19 at 19:20, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> > > On Mon, Dec 19, 2005 at 10:01:15AM -0800, Mike Bird wrote:
> > > An out of the box Ubuntu install will not generate any email.
> > 
> > An out of the box Breezy install will try to generate emails,
> > but will fail.  There's no obvious indication that the emails
> > are lost.  In Hoary they would have been delivered.
> > 
> 
> As a specific example, cron uses /usr/bin/sendmail to send email, when a
> cron job writes to stderr or stdout (if the script does not redirect
> stdout/stderr to files).
> 
> As the run-parts script does not redirect stdout/stderr, I found a
> message in my mailbox today, after adding mailx/postfix, because one of
> the steps in cron.daily detected an error.
> 
> Now, I admit that most new users would not understand what is meant by
> the error 
>         /etc/cron.daily/man-db:
>         mandb: warning: /usr/share/man/man1/rmic.1.gz is a dangling
>         symlink
>         
> but the fact that the message was written to my mailbox after I
> installed postfix *proves* that a standard breezy install *does*
> generate (or at least *try to* generate) email messages.
> 
> Is Matthew saying:
> 1:  That cron should depend on mail-transport-agent (since it explicitly
> tries to invoke /usr/sbin/sendmail)
> 
> OR 
> 
> 2: That cron should NOT be installed in ubuntu/kubuntu

Or 3: cron should be using the log facility to write any messages. That
way it behaves just like most other periodic functions in the system,
and you don't need an MTA just for cron anymore.





-- 
Dr. Jan Morén (mr)              
Japan:  090-3622 8920           jan.moren at lucs.lu.se
Sweden: 031-360 7723            http://lucs.lu.se/people/jan.moren