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

[Derek Broughton]

Jan Moren wrote:

> Well, for what it's worth, I have never understood why a few
> applications - cron chief among them - are not using the same
> information paths as every single other system app. Not even an MTA
> mails you if there is a problem - it just notes it in the logfile.

If the MTA is borked, you'll know because no mail is going out or arriving
(and how _could_ the MTA mail you if there was a problem, anyway?)

> If you think there's a possibility of this actually being changed I say
> go for it.
 
A "few" apps need to let a specific person know what they do.  I can't
imagine going into syslog every day to see what happened in cron.daily (all
the output would be spread throughout the log).  It could however be
handled by having all output from cron being logged under a specific
facility, then log rules could split it out from syslog if you wanted.

However, it's not rocket science to have cron physically place the output
file in a specific maildir, which seems to be what the developers want to
happen rather than sending mail - it just seems that that's a function
that's already handled by MTAs, so why reinvent the wheel?
-- 
derek