[gentoo-dev] Unnecessary source patch in procmail ebuild for default maildir

[José Fonseca]

Dear Gentoo developers,


First I'd like to say that so far I got pretty impressed with Gentoo, and 
that I appreciate the work you all have done.

In the process of switching from my previous distribution I came across 
with the Gentoo's default maildir format. (I confess that I disagree with 
this default option but this hardly matters to the case.)

Although one can use the mbox USE flag I was unaware of all this when I 
first built Gentoo. In the quest of switching everything back to the mbox 
format the procmail program gave my quite a few headaches. There was no 
global configuration file so I decided to take a look to the ebuild and 
voilá: there was a (sed) patch to the source which defined the default 
spool dir. This immediately seemed rather excessive since surely a program 
like procmail would have a configuration option to control that, and it 
had indeed. To reset to the default behaviour I just created 
/etc/procmailrc as:

	DEFAULT=/var/spool/mail/$LOGNAME

So instead of patching the source I strongly advise that the ebuild 
generates a /etc/procmailrc like:

	DEFAULT=$HOME/.maildir/

This way someone wanting to change the default on a running system can 
just do:
	 
	grep -r "\.maildir" /etc/*

and easily finds all the spots where he should tweak, instead of dwelling 
into the ebuilds and patches...


Since I'm starting to enjoy Gentoo I'll eventually contribute some 
ebuilds, but I still didn't gave the step to properly study them, and this 
should be very easy to fix for someone who is familiar with them.


Regards,

José Fonseca