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Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

Posted Aug 2, 2013 7:38 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
In reply to: Fedora keeps sendmail — for now by dlang
Parent article: Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

The mindset that "in some cases this isn't useful, so we should remove it completely from the install and force anyone who wants to to install it manually" seems very wrong to me.

I think there is something to be said for keeping the default installation lean. One could argue that having something like gcc, Emacs or TeX around would be »useful except in some cases«, but even so these packages are usually not part of the default installation.

I quite agree that it would be reasonable for distributions to allow the installing user to specify a destination for outbound mail to an administrator. It is by no means clear, however, that supporting this use case would require a full-blown MTA on the scale of Sendmail to be installed by default.


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Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

Posted Aug 2, 2013 7:42 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

actually, I will somewhat disagree with you.

I think that for an opensource/free software desktop, gcc should be installed by default. Emacs and TeX aren't needed (says a vi user ;-) but it's hard to do very much stuff other than just being a consumer of services without running into some need for gcc, at least indirectly.

Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

Posted Aug 2, 2013 7:48 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

I think that for an opensource/free software desktop, gcc should be installed by default.

I'm with you, but:

  • not every Linux system ends up as an »opensource/free software desktop« (I personally try to avoid installing gcc on my servers), and …
  • tell that to the distribution makers. I don't know whether Fedora installs gcc by default, but Debian and openSUSE – to name two other very popular distributions – don't.

Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

Posted Aug 2, 2013 10:27 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

personally, I don't like any distro's stock install for a production server. There's always something I want to add to the stock install, and several things that I remove.

I like how Debian has a "minimal" install, which is fairly close to the minimum needed to boot, talk on the network, and install additional packaged. This doesn't include gcc, but it doesn't include X or any "desktop" software either. This makes it a good starting point for a server build.

Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

Posted Aug 2, 2013 12:08 UTC (Fri) by peter-b (subscriber, #66996) [Link]

Fedora also has a "minimal" install (@core) which is exactly the same thing: just enough to boot and install packages.

Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

Posted Aug 13, 2013 3:36 UTC (Tue) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link]

> Fedora also has a "minimal" install (@core) which is exactly the same thing: just enough to boot and install packages.

Well, it has more than that. For example, it had sendmail in it before we decided, with this change, to remove it from that set.

Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

Posted Aug 2, 2013 20:29 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

But surely you agree that there are thousands of useful packages that should not be in the default install. What I haven't seen yet is what you think sets MTAs apart from those. Is it because an MTA has been in the default install in the past?

Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

Posted Aug 2, 2013 11:48 UTC (Fri) by johannbg (subscriber, #65743) [Link]

"I think there is something to be said for keeping the default installation lean."

Those defaults are part of the problem not the solution since people dont seem to realize for the first nothing goes away from Fedora unless it's dead upstream or no one no longer maintains it here with us so it just means things just get shuffled in,out or between comps groups.

And while we have an "default" this will always be the case, people always scream if something is added or removed to the so called "default" instead of those individuals engaging and participating in the relevant sub-community and influence and have that discussion there.

Which is why I'm forming a Gnome SIG an Gnome sub-community within Fedora [1] which will be aimed to deliver upstream modern, high-quality Gnome optimized desktop only experience targeted towards regular people for regular usage on common hardware. No more lvm, no more rsyslog, no more sendmail no more half baked enterprise/admin/desktop "defaults" that wind up being equally crappy for everybody causing nothing but tension,arguments and friction within our community and no more holding back progress in the process.

And this will sail proudly under the name Gnome not "defaults" or "desktop" just like KDE,XFCE,LXDE Sugar and other sub-community already are and have been doing for all those years...

If you are interested in participating in this effort feel free to join.

1. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/Gnome

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