nicolas vigier a écrit :
On Tue, 18 Oct 2011, andre999 wrote:
Balcaen John a écrit :
Le lundi 17 octobre 2011 16:39:14 nicolas vigier a écrit :
[...]
I think that :
- changing the default configuration in an update is wrong. If it's
better that msec do not send emails by default, I think this change
should be done in cauldron only, maybe with some note about this change
in the release notes for Mageia 2.
Agree.
A question : wouldn't changing the default in _both_ cauldron and an update
to mga1 be acceptable ?
I think stable updates should not change defaults.
Since I really think that sending messages silently to dead.letter,
gradually filling up the disk is a bug. (When I first discovered the
problem on my system a few years ago, dead.letter used about 1G of disk
space in my root partition.)
That is what happens with the default setting, if an MTA is not installed.
At the default settings with an MTA installed, the root mailbox gradually
fills up the disk, if it is not emptied. And a less informed user is
unlikely to realise this.
So it seems to me that as a minimum, the default should be changed to _not_
send alert emails. Since the status is visible on the main msec screen,
informed users should have no problem appropriately adjusting the setting.
To deal with the potential problem of users who use the email alert feature
having it deactivated by the update, we only need a warning in the update,
as often occurs for other packages.
Updates should not require manual changes. And not everybody read the
update logs from urpmi. People can expect important changes when upgrading
to a new version of the distribution, and that's why there is release
notes to explain the important changes, but not for stable updates.
Personally I am much more likely to notice the update log message from
urpmi than everything in the release notes. I make a point of reading
the former, which necessarily affect an application that I have installed.
Most of the release notes comments are either painfully obvious, or
affect something that I don't have installed or don't care about, so I
tend to miss many details until I run into a problem.
In this particular case, the problem would be not getting msec
notifications.
Although I realise that in general it would be better to avoid
significant changes in updates, in this case I think that most users
would be better served by this change being introduced in an update,
rather than in a release.
Something like "If you use the msec alert emails, please verify that the
alerts are still active." Note that if the user has ever explicitly set
alerts, they would be still active.
I was mistaken. But editing /etc/security/msec/security.conf to add the
line "MAIL_WARN=yes" will protect from a default of "MAIL_WARN=no".
(Tested.)
This potential problem would exist even if the next update for the user is
mga2.
However, if the update is on mga2 (from changes in cauldron), wouldn't the
change in defaults be less visible ?
[...]
According to documentation, dma is only active if no other MTA is installed.
(I don't know if the priority is what causes this.)
So at worst dma would be a (very small) harmless extra install, at best it
would ensure the ability for local delivery.
Then dma could be installed by default on mageia 2, this would fix the
problem for all programs using the sendmail command, not only msec,
without adding a require on dma.
That would work, as long as it is a "require" of Mageia 2.
It might be better than making it a require of only msec.
In sum, as long as by mga2, mta is required and msec no longer sends
alerts by default, that works for me.
But I still think that it would be better to implement it as an update
before. (For the reasons indicated above.)
--
André
