I'm pissed-off. Maybe it's just because I don't cope well with change.
I'm not a veteran Linux user by any means. I'm pretty much one level above newbie. I just don't like change because it makes learning harder when I don't know what to expect.
So two weeks ago I installed Debian 9 from the "Net Installer" into a VirtualBox VM. Then two days ago I created another VM and did the same install, using the same ISO image, and making the same selections as before.
Only this time, I discovered that the resulting system was missing packages that I expected to be there. The packages were related to mailing on the local system, and consisted primarily of exim4 and mailutils.
After much painful searching (and putting up with unfriendly skeptics on the Debian forums) I finally found out that the reason these packages are no longer installed is because sometime in the past fifteen days, they changed the package priority from 'standard' to 'optional', causing the Net Installer to no longer download or install them.
What the hell? I thought that having a 'mail' command was a standard thing. Well, not anymore, in the world of Debian. They are changing the fundamentals of the system that I got used to. But I guess that's what they want to do, and I guess I shouldn't be surprised by that. The change to systemd was the first major indicator of Debian's new plan.
Well I guess I can't rely on Debian to include the features that a standard *nix system should have anymore. Not that I'm experienced enough to know all the features that rely on mail. I do know that I won't get any output from cron jobs now. But if I file a bug report on that, they'll probably just say "fuck it" and pull cron from their default install as well...
My post to Debian Forums that only got replies from unfriendly skeptics:
http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=134079
My Debian bug report that nobody will care about:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=870030
Debian people discussing "cutting some cruft from priority:standard":
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2014/09/msg00480.html
