On 12/31/2013 08:37 PM, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
That would be a lousy bet really. You can be aligning yourself with more
technical users.
On a similar note. What do you base your opinion on?
(Some of them have been "technical users", but by no means all)
Regular uses probably have never heard of /etc/aliases
at all and certainly don't read root mail at all.
If a user can read about journalctl and find information about how to
use that, he/she could equally well do the same thing regarding
/etc/aliases and reading root mail. (Remember that I proposed that
/etc/aliases should be setup at install time of Fedora, so that would
already be in place, following my proposal)
For desktop users, there are several methods to get the information
they typically care about ex: desktop notification that disk is failing
and it is feasible to extend them to cover more things.
That was the use case I was thinking about. (In the server case the
administrator (hopefully) have knowledge to set up the system the way
he/she wants, including/excluding MTA and/or syslog facilities.)
Notifications could be one way for some things. Perhaps output from root
mail, cron, logwatch or similar applications could be taken care of that
way.
But there must also be a way to look into logs in an easy way.
The user might experience some problems with the installation. He/she
contacts a friend. The usual response often is, "what does the log say",
or "could you find xyz in the log", or something similar. So whatever
one thinks about logs, they are important, even for non technical users.
And an ASCII file is often easier for a non technical user to handle
than a new and perhaps never used command.
As we do not have a (full-blown) system where mail to root could be
shown to the user as notifications. And simple text files actually is
easier for non technical users to handle. It still makes sense to
include a MTA and syslog. When we have applications that take care of
these things, and present them to the user in a good way, then we could
remove the MTA and syslog. At the moment the user is left in some sort
of limbo loosing mails sent to root, and having problems reading log files.
Off to new year celebrations here. Happy new year to all!
Lars
--
Lars E. Pettersson <lars@xxxxxxxx>
http://www.sm6rpz.se/
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