[Popcon-developers] Bug#264593: popularity-contest: it should be possible to configure user which invokes sendmail

[Martin Dickopp]

On Tue, Aug 10, 2004 at 01:50:27PM +0200, Bill Allombert wrote:
> My position is that your patch does not achieve anything that cannot
> be achieved already, given it only touch configuration files that are
> meant to be modified by the user,

That's true, but my patch makes it easier to achieve it. :)

> 1) I would like to know what benefits there are to forbid root to send
>    email to the outside world.

It follows the administration policy to technically prevent things which
are not supposed to happen.  This way, the mistake can be detected more
easily if such a thing happens accidentally.

> 2) I would like to know whether a sizeable number of users are likely 
>    to want to setup such a policy.

This can obviously not be determined without a survey.

> 3) Without your patch, users that want to implement that policy need
>    to change one line in the conffile /etc/cron.weekly/popcon. With that
>    patch, those users need to change one line in the conffile
>    /etc/popularity.conf. I don't see any real benefit here.

With the patch, users have to add a (documented) environment variable
instead of modifying a line of code in a script.  IMHO, that's easier.

> 4) For full disclosure, we (popcon maintainers) discussed the issue
>    before and we came to the conclusion that:
> 
> 4.1) It was not possible to guess a non-root account suitable to send
>      email to the outside world.
> 
> 4.2) Adding yet another debconf template to ask the user to give a
>      suitable account was not deemed a good idea.

I agree with both of the above, therefore the patch does not change the
default behavior.

> 4.3) We should keep things simple so people that need to change 
>      /etc/cron.weekly/popcon can do it without too much hassle.

So your objection is that the patch makes /etc/cron.weekly/popcon more
complicated?

> 4.4) Alternatively we could add a popcon user and use it to send email,
>      unfortunately we would have no way to ensure the mail system is properly
>      configured for that user.

I agree that a popcon user wouldn't be a good idea.

> 5) Invoking SC #4 on dubious ground is a sure way to escaladate
>    issues.

Okay, my remark was a bit off the mark.  I really cannot present any
more arguments than I already did, so if you remain unconvinced, I can
only suggest that you close this bug or tag it "wontfix".  In this case,
I also apologize for occupying your time so close to a release, although
I can assure you that my intentions were only the best.

Cheers,
Martin