[lsb-discuss] Clarification of general LSB requirements

[Russ Allbery]

Mats Wichmann <mats at wichmann.us> writes:

> In 2001, it was a more server-oriented world for Linux than it is today
> (that is, if you consider Android a Linux derivative, in which case it
> and other embedded deployments far dominate the servers in the landscape
> in numerical terms).  It seemed a good idea in the earlier days to have
> a way for a background program to have a way to let someone know if
> there had been some issue that was not easy to notify about
> interactively, because... well... the activity wasn't interactive. LSB
> specifies that you can launch an email-type message using a standard
> path to an agent, and it specifies an interface to syslog (which I guess
> you could argue also has a great chance of not getting looked at).  I'm
> not sure that requirement has exactly vanished, even if it's a much more
> mobile/embedded world than it was all those years ago.

> Is there a better solution?  LSB isn't a static thing, make a suggestion
> if there's something that should change!

In terms of server-oriented notification, I think this is what syslog is
for in most cases (particularly the somewhat underused higher priorities
if the problem is serious).

My experience is that basically everything of interest uses syslog
*except* cron for output from cron jobs.  That's for good reasons (the
output can be quite long) and extensive historical reasons, and I'm not
sure if syslog is a good replacement.  But I do think cron's requirements
are somewhat idiosyncratic to cron, and I'm not sure it makes sense to
require a functioning MTA only for cron job output.

For desktop systems, I think this is a hard problem with no good solution.
Neither email nor syslog are likely to reach the attention of a user on a
desktop system, unless they've gone to the trouble of explicitly
configuring the email environment on their desktop to send root mail to
some address they actually read.  Those of us on this list probably do
that, but I doubt the average Linux desktop user does.

I suspect the long-term desktop answer is going to be some sort of
persistent alert messaging integrated with the desktop, akin to a
graphical version of the very old UNIX msgs system.  Coming up with such a
thing is outside the scope of LSB, though.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>