Ubuntu is under attack

[Mike Bird]

On Tue, 2005-12-20 at 13:07, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> >From the point of view of removing an MTA by default? No, I think that's 
> the correct decision. The argument that there should be some way for 
> cron output to end up being given to the user is a much stronger one, 
> but I don't think just adding an MTA back is the right way of fixing 
> that. 

OK, I'm often using one of my desktops at the time cron runs, but
they're a couple of miles apart so I can't really watch both.
What if the grandkids are playing a game when a problem arises?
What if a normal person tries to use Ubuntu and is in bed at 1am
when cron runs?  What about mail notifications from "mdadm -F"
and the gadget which I haven't figured out which sends emails
when a non-sudoer is running KDE as root?

Why not just send the notification into the regular mail stream
which pretty much everyone checks?  It could be root at localhost
in the middle of the Sahara, myguru at support.firm for schools
and busineses, or me at myisp.com for the techno cogniscenti.  It
can be /dev/null for some of the people on this list if that's
what they want.

If you're going to change how cron works, who gets to write
Ubuntu-ized versions of the all apps out there?  The little
cronjobs tend to just write to stdout/stderr but the fancier
applications tend to package it all up nicely and then pipe
it to mail with a nice subject line.

This crusade against email breaks applications that you and
I have never heard of.  It breaks the "Just Works" promise
and it prevents LSB 3.0 compliance which will soon start to
mean that applications won't be certified to run on Ubuntu
and people will be advised to go with a better distro.
It hurts security (lost warning messages) and it doesn't
help security (daemon on 127.0.0.1 is not open to internet).

And the upside is?

--Mike Bird