AFAIK, mdadm's default (and maybe only supported, without some custom scripting) way to report a degraded array is email. That's definitely an important feature as not noticing a degraded array will result in complete data loss (well, or at least restore from backup).
OTOH, seems weird for Dracut to recommend mdadm. Surely a system booting from RAID would already have it installed? On May 30, 2017 7:57:03 AM EDT, Ansgar Burchardt <ans...@debian.org> wrote: >Hi, > >my impression is that too many packages use Recommends that should >really be Suggests. As a random example: installing dracut as a >initramfs provider will pull in exim4... (dracut-core Recommends: mdadm >which Recommends: default-mta | mail-transport-agent). This seems >really not ideal. > >As a result many people seem to disable installing recommended packages >by default. I believe we should be much more agressive in downgrading >dependencies to Suggests. > >For example, very few packages should Depend/Recommend a MTA: if you >just send notifications (like mdadm), you would need a properly >configured MTA anyway or they just end up in a file nobody will ever >look at (I don't see local mail to root as very useful). > >I suggest that only very few packages should Recommend a MTA: packages >that mainly deal with mail on servers in some way or another (for >user-facing applications, speaking SMTP to a remote SMTP server is >common enough that these shouldn't Recommend a MTA usually either). > >Ansgar
