MTA as an implementation detail (Was: Ubuntu is under attack)

[Tristan Wibberley]

Mike Bird wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-12-21 at 11:08, 'Forum Post wrote:
> 
>>Mike Bird Wrote: 
>>Oh no, not a notification bubble!  Please noooooo!  One of the most
>>annoying things about XP is those stupid notification bubbles that pop
>>up whenever you're trying to do actual work on the computer. 
>>
>>At least make it something those of us who like a clean, non-annoying,
>>efficient, and usable desktop can turn off.
> 
> 
> The proposal is that the debconf choices should include /dev/null,
> Matthew's notification bubble (perhaps I have mischaracterised it
> - if so I apologize), local mail delivery, delivery via SMTP to
> a specified catch-all address, or "I'll configure it myself".

Note that the notification could quite easily just use some code from a
biff to read from a system notification account's maildir. An MTA is an
implementation detail it is not a user feature (so usability and
advanced vs novice don't bear on the topic - not that you suggested they
do, just they are common themes in this thread). Further the MTA (and an
nntp server) can be used to implement many more user features. They are
a well tested, and quite flexible communication mechanisms that can be
directly used immediately by all if the clients are configured properly
by default.

> Notification bubbles, local mail, outbound SMTP ... none would
> be compulsory.  Let's provide useful choices to people so that
> Ubuntu can "Just Work" out of the box as promised.

The great thing about an MTA like postfix is that it can provide the
core logic for all of those and is already written/well debugged/well
understood by many, many people/etc. I think centring things around an
MTA like postfix will make for a very powerful system that can be easily
extended to do more imaginative things by powerusers and provides a
focus for mindshare, testing, and learning the system. It's highly
suitable for all non-realtime (in its loose sense) notification
messages. I would like to see something like postfix used rather than
just a /sbin/sendmail implementation so that everybody has the same.
Postfix really is reasonably small, on AMD64 it's a 1M package and about
2.2M installed - compare that to the packages for OOo2-base-experimental
at 3.6M or OOo2-base (32bit) at 2.9M and postfix starts to look like
really good value for bits..

Now this email really *is* offtopic 'cos its moved into the realms of
implementation detail. I've sent this to ubuntu-devel too, since the
thread seems to be wandering over there, please don't reply to this
message on ubuntu-user. If this doesn't have the correct followup
headers set, its because I'm using Gmane.

-- 
Tristan Wibberley