perl-Mail-:SPF should obsolete perl-Mail-SPF-Query

Paul Howarth paul at city-fan.org
Tue Sep 22 09:06:32 UTC 2009


On 21/09/09 19:16, Warren Togami wrote:
> On 09/21/2009 11:41 AM, Paul Howarth wrote:
>> On 21/09/09 16:33, Warren Togami wrote:
>>> Should we obsolete and remove perl-Mail-SPF-Query? Apparently
>>> perl-Mail-SPF obsoleted perl-Mail-SPF-Query ~3 years ago.
>>
>> Really? Says who? It certainly doesn't provide any implementation of
>> Mail::SPF::Query.
>>
>>> spampd owned by thias is the only package according to repoquery that
>>> requires perl(Mail::SPF::Query).
>>
>> What is to be gained by doing this other than a miniscule saving in
>> mirror space and metadata size?
>>
>> Paul.
>>
>
> What stake do you have in defending software that hasn't been developed
> in 3+ years?

I'm sure there's plenty of software in Fedora that hasn't been developed 
in 3+ years, sometimes as in this case because it's dead upstream and 
sometimes because it's simply stable and doesn't need fixing.

Other than the fact that I did the original upstream packaging for this 
module, I have no particular attachment to this package. If it goes from 
Fedora I won't miss it myself.

I fully accept that any new development of perl code using SPF will use 
Mail::SPF and not Mail::SPF::Query. I see that you're removing the 
(optional) SPF functionality from spampd, which is OK because it passes 
mail through SpamAssassin, which has its own SPF code, so there won't be 
any user of Mail::SPF::Query in Rawhide. There may still be 
out-of-distribution code such as the original sendmail-spf-milter that 
uses it though.

On 21/09/09 23:37, Warren Togami wrote:
 > On 09/21/2009 05:06 PM, Warren Togami wrote:
 > spampd was requiring perl(Mail::SPF::Query) for no good reason.
 > Rather than require Mail::SPF I've stripped that artificial
 > requirement because SPF is actually rather useless. So now nothing
 > in Fedora requires perl(Mail::SPF::Query).

Since SPF is as you say "rather useless", why aren't you trying to get 
rid of Mail::SPF too?

 > I'm soon blocking perl-Mail-SPF-Query from rawhide. It is true that
 > perl-Mail-SPF does not provide perl(Mail::SPF::Query). perl-Mail-SPF
 > will obsolete perl-Mail-SPF-Query to ensure its removal but not
 > "provide" for the old package.
 >
 > Any objections?

I'm not objecting to perl-Mail-SPF-Query being blocked from Rawhide and 
marked as a dead package, given its maintainer's consent. I am, however, 
curious as to just why you've singled out this particular package out of 
the myriad of legacy code that's in the distribution and doing no harm. 
Or is there some big issue with it that I'm not aware of?

I'm also not sure about the merits of having perl-Mail-SPF obsolete 
perl-Mail-SPF-Query. Why do we need to remove something from users' 
systems that (a) they may be actually using, and (b) does not in any way 
conflict or cause problems for the upgraded distribution?

Paul.




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