Bug#465342: libmime-lite-perl: Unusable without mail-transport-agent

[Dominic Hargreaves]

Package: libmime-lite-perl
Version: 3.021-2
Severity: important

[quoting from #462314]

> On Wed, 23 Jan 2008 14:27:30 -0800, Josh Triplett wrote:
> 
> > libmime-lite-perl depends on nullmailer | mail-transport-agent.
> > However, libmime-lite-perl does not actually need an MTA unless the
> > caller wants to send a mail using the sendmail method.
> > libmime-lite-perl can also generate MIME messages and send them via
> > SMTP, or return them as a string.  Thus, this makes an MTA *at most* a
> > Recommends.  I would argue for Suggests, since I do not believe
> > libmime-lite-perl needs an MTA "in all but unusual installations".

You may believe this, but this doesn't make it true :)
 
> Thanks for your bugreport.
> 
> After some discussion on IRC we've now moved the MTA from Depends
> (as it's really not necessary) to Recommends (as 'sendmail' is the
> default method for ->send() and therefore probably expected to work on
> Linux systems).

Sorry, no. Your change causes libmime-lite-perl to be entirely broken
when no mail-transport-agent is available:

dom at callisto:~$ apt-cache policy libmime-lite-perl
libmime-lite-perl:
  Installed: 3.021-2
  Candidate: 3.021-2
  Version table:
 *** 3.021-2 0
        500 http://the.earth.li sid/main Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
dom at callisto:~$ which sendmail
dom at callisto:~$ perl -MMIME::Lite
can't find an executable sendmail at - line 0
Compilation failed in require.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted.

(cf http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=464292)

Please reinstate the dependency you removed, or patch upstream not to die
under these conditions.

Thanks,

Dominic.