Ubuntu is under attack

[Ewan Mac Mahon]

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

> > 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.

The problem is that if you carry that logic through to cron itself you
wind up making it depend on an MTA and you're back to postfix being
installed by default.


On Wed, Dec 21, 2005 at 02:24:14AM +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> As I said, a better approach would be to ensure that notification
> reaches the users it needs to reach independently of email. I think
> that's achievable.

Why make it independant of email? How does this sound as a best of both
worlds scenario: Default install has postfix (or other MTA) installed
for local delivery, just as happened under Hoary. Add a default panel
applet, similar in look and feel to the update-notifier (call it
system-notifier, say) that's actually just a speciallized MUA that reads
the user's local mail spool and removes messages once they've been read.
That way the new users get the messages without ever realizing that an
email system is involved, old users get to read their mail with mutt or
send it somewhere else, and no-one needs to rewrite cron (or anything
else) to use dbus instead of email.

That has the side benefit of working for emailed alerts from anything
the users installs as an extra, as well as for things in the base system
- just because someone's installed something that depends on an MTA
doesn't mean that they're going to realise that they need to check
their local mail.

Ewan
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