On Sat, Jul 31, 1999 at 09:25:02AM -0600, John Galt wrote:
> On Sat, 31 Jul 1999, Mark Brown wrote:
> > On Fri, Jul 30, 1999 at 08:25:25PM -0600, John Galt wrote:
> > > This would be more of an arguement for a MTA being a priority:required
> > > rather than a Depends: on an Extra package. The other question that this
> > There are a selection of MTAs. No given one of them is required, it's
> > just that you ought to have one installed.
> Yeah, you ought to have one installed, so why add a redundant dependency
> to a MUA? Because a you OUGHT to have a MTA with your MUA as well--not
What I was trying to point out was that since you have a choice of MTAs,
making one of them priority required is a Bad Idea. Important, perhaps,
although that could create the wrong impression ("It is important that
you install exim" rather than "exim is the standard MTA on Debian").
> need, ought: I'm beating a dead horse, but we've only discovered one MUA
> that is completely useless without a MTA, mutt (and as far as I'm
> concerned, it's just about as useless WITH a MTA)
Guess which mail client I use :-) . mailx also requires sendmail, but I
don't know many people who use that as their main MUA.
> > Policy requires that packages do not depend on any package of lower
> > priority, and in any case a recommendation is almost as strong as a
> > dependancy in dselect (of course, many people use apt these days).
> Policy also requires that a package be made universally useless without
> another package before it can be said to depend on it, and I've said it
> more times than I care to count: A MUA CAN WORK IN AT LEAST ONE CASE
> WITHOUT A LOCAL MTA--that of being used as a POP/IMAP client for a
> remote SMTP server, and that's all that's necessary to go from Depends: to
> Recommends: PERIOD.
You seem to be confusing me with someone who has a big disagreement with
what you are saying.
One important reason for not doing this is the idea that a package
should work in the default configuration and should conform to the
expectations of an experienced user. Exactly how important this is
depends on your point of view. Since there is an MTA installed as
standard it's something of a moot issue here, but it can be very
annoying when it happens.
> > > MTA is essential, but I'm doubting that it can be said to be a dependency
> > > of a MUA, more like a recommends:
> > For MUAs which send mail by calling sendmail, it is pretty much a
> > dependancy.
> What if I'm using smail, qmail, or postfix--those are all valid MTAs for
> the dependency--but they won't get called when a fork goes out to sendmail
> (except smail, I believe it aliases sendmail to itself in installation),
I'm talking about the /usr/lib/sendmail program, which all the MTAs I
have experience with provide. It's pretty much a requirement for a Unix
MTA to make one avalible and I'd be surprised if anything providing
mail-transport-agent ships without one.
--
Mark Brown mailto:broonie@tardis.ed.ac.uk (Trying to avoid grumpiness)
http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~broonie/
EUFS http://www.eusa.ed.ac.uk/societies/filmsoc/
Attachment:
pgp7nL3oPnnjs.pgp
Description: PGP signature