Bug#898136: lintian: Reduce depends-on-mail-transport-agent-without-alternatives to pedantic
Chris Lamb <lamby@debian.org> writes:
> Just to confirm; it currently it reports for all packages that provide
> mail-transport-agent, ie:
> citadel-server
> courier-mta
> dma
> esmtp-run
> exim4
> exim4-daemon-heavy
> exim4-daemon-light
> masqmail
> msmtp-mta
> nullmailer
> opensmtpd
> postfix
> qmail-run
> sendmail-bin
> ssmtp
> .. and the suggestion is that this list is (essentially) reduced to
> just exim4?
> If so, I don't believe this would warrant the change in severity.
Some more research:
I looked at the original bug report from Paul Wise (cc'd) (#892144), and
the motivation was unclear to me. Were there packages in the archive that
depended on only one MTA and weren't MTA add-ons or otherwise
intentionally locked to just one MTA?
I just now checked, and the packages currently diagnosed with this tag [1]
are 100% false positives, which makes me wonder if this tag should just be
deleted.
At first glance, the bug this tag is trying to diagnose seems unlikely to
me. I'm not sure how many maintainers intended to depend on a generic
mail-transport-agent and just picked one out of a hat (although I admit
the lack of documentation in Policy for how to declare this dependency
doesn't help). In contrast, add-ons for one specific MTA, or management
interfaces that only know how to configure one specific MTA, are fairly
common.
[1] https://lintian.debian.org/tags/depends-on-mail-transport-agent-without-alternatives.html
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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