Re: Fwd: Re: new SpamAssasin flavor

["David S." <davids@idiom.com>]

> > It's simple: we are not adding 8 different flavours because there are 7
> > people who don't like something small (a useless one-line change in this
> > case), instead there is 1 for the other thousands of people using this
> > port.  The complexity you are suggesting, is, the way I see it, not
> > needed.  The flavours are basically for different functionality in a
> > program, be it to pull some extra patches, or enable some different
> > options at build time... and we are definitely not going to explode the
> > tree with anything like what you are suggesting - this is not what they
> > are for!
> 
> Sure, but SpamAssassin's operation does not not depend on procmail, it will
> work just fine without it. It's an artificial dependency that is only based
> on the notion that it is, possibly, more common to use it with procmail
> than without. Why not keep it even simpler and not depend on procmail
> and let those users who need and want it install procmail themselves. No
> need for any flavors.
> A person who wants to use procmail with SpamAssassin is presumably competent
> enough to understand that they need to install procmail.
> I'm sure many use procmail with Exim and Postfix but neither of these ports
> depend on procmail.


My preference is to apply Occam's Razor in this circumstance: if the 
port will function without a given dependency (in some broad understanding
of "function"), then eliminate the dependency,


David S.


> 
> ----
> Lars Hansson