[Bug 210537] [patch] [feature request] set MIME type in cron-generated e-mails

[bugzilla-noreply at freebsd.org]

https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=210537

--- Comment #10 from Eugene Grosbein <eugen at freebsd.org> ---
(In reply to Mikhail T. from comment #9)

> cron-jobs aren't supposed to spit /anything/ to standard output

They are, as any other shell command.

> why should the logic be any different, if I switched to fetching a JPG?

Because SMTP does not support unencoded arbitrary binary data. That is,
"Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary" is not supported in the Internet e-mail: no
MTA is supposed to to receive and process such data, and many do not.

And I don't think we should make cron to perform MIME encoding.

> What overhead?

libmagic processing may be expensive in terms of I/O, memory and CPU times.
Have you tried to evaluate this overhead using some slow CPU like Intel Atom or
ARM or MIPS32? You may be surprised. It evolves reading significant amount of
libmagic own data and I/O may be slow due to slow media like CompactFlash. Then
it may run plenty regexp's against input data. The whole process can easily
long for seconds of wall time making measurable system load.

Such processing should be opt-in, not opt-out.

-- 
You are receiving this mail because:
You are the assignee for the bug.