Re: Mutt dependency on an MTA
Heh. My simple question about mutt grew into a whole philosophical
discussion of mail and dependency issues...
I'd like to remind people that my original problem was that I did have an
MTA installed, but that MTA happened be qmail which I built myself in
/usr/local. So from the point of view of the packaging system, I has no MTA
and it refused to install mutt for that reason.
I don't think I'm qualified to offer an opinion on whether MUAs should
depend on MTAs in general case, but I feel that there should be an easy way
to tell dpkg or apt-get that yes, I do have an MTA installed, even though
you don't know about it. My specific problem was solved by downloading
equivs and installing a fake package for an MTA, but that looks and smells
like a big kludge. I feel that Debian should be easier to use with
non-Debianised software, and in particular the packaging system should not
assume that it knows everything about the particular machine. Especially in
the case where the dependency is not on a very specific piece of code (as a
library), but on a general class of service provider. I think that for
dependencies on stuff like "a text editor", "an MTA", etc. the installation
software should ask the admin/user if he has such a beast and believe him
when he says yes. I understand the this can potentially confuse the newbies,
but half a screen of text explaining what's going on should make this
reasonable.
Kaa
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