Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
Where do you receive your notifications that your disk space is nearly full, or that smartctl thinks a drive is dangerously near death?
Guess where those notifications go? In /var/spool/mail/root. Guess who pops up a notification on my non-root desktop to notify me that my harddisk is dying? Nobody.
Ahh, so you've finally identified a problem that needs to be solved. Unless you think the distribution should cater only to people who don't care if their computers work or not?
A problem needing fix was identified at the beginning of the thread.
Waiting for daemon startup before doing something else in the bootup sequence has a simple solution. Don't wait. You don't have to remove functionality.
Except that you insist on keeping the broken status quo.
The status quo in terms of services is not broken. Other programs should be able to assume that a reasonable operating systems includes mail delivery.
Things like hardware notifications can much easier be done using HAL and D-BUS than using local mail.
Such notifications would not be likely to seen by me as I almost never sit near the machines where the disks live. Who gets them if multiple users are logged in via X or freenx? Or if no one is logged in at all, or if X isn't running?