Ubuntu is under attack

[Matthew Garrett]

On Tue, Dec 20, 2005 at 02:08:34PM -0800, Mike Bird wrote:

> 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.

Becuse the assumption that pretty much everyone checks the regular mail 
stream is inaccurate. In a default install (even pre-Breezy) that mail 
doesn't go anywhere that most users are likely to see it. My girlfriend 
doesn't go around opening terminals in order to check whether any cron 
mail has turned up.

> 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.

...and so should depend on a mail transfer agent.

> 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?

The LSB argument is significantly more compelling than the others.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org