Goal: Increased Modularity?

[Bill Nottingham]

Richi Plana (myfedora at richip.dhs.org) said: 
> On Tue, 2007-09-04 at 12:57 -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> > Richi Plana (myfedora at richip.dhs.org) said: 
> > > For instance, if I desired to come up with a spin that doesn't have
> > > Sendmail, why must I give up fetchmail, mutt or tor?
> > 
> > Because they *require* a MTA to deliver/send the mail, at least in their
> > default configurations
> 
> Well, I figured that they are required because of their default
> configurations. But would Fedora be interested in changing it if
> modularity were indeed the higher goal?
> 
> Besides, you said it requires an MTA. Would an effort to add the ability
> to detect the availability of /sbin/sendmail in the above-mentioned
> packages and use it if available or speak SMTP over port 25 if not be
> desirable? Packages like evolution and thunderbird do that and therefore
> don't "Require: sendmail".

It's somehow better to have each package require its own separate
configuration than to use a central package that only takes 2MB? I'm
not saying you can't do it, but:

- every mutt user would have to set up their own muttrc with smtp server information
- every fetchmail user would have to change their invocation
- and so on, for each package as needed

> > dlopen will cause you to break at runtime instead of buildtime if
> > ABI changes - that's not good.
> 
> Isn't that what escalating the version number to a higher layer (ie. RPM
> and yum) is all about?

Sure, but then you're still breaking at runtime instead of build/install
time.

Bill