ending the spam.assassin.prefs.conf madness.

[Julian Field]

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Matt Kettler wrote:

>Julian Field wrote:
>  
>
>>Okay, I understand that I shouldn't be putting site-wide settings in
>>spam.assassin.prefs.conf as it stands.
>>    
>>
>
>Julian.. Here's another point to consider... Why should MailScanner's
>installation be modifying the site options AT ALL?
>  
>
To make it easier/automatic for 90-something % of users.

>For example, you're specifying "lock_method flock" in spam.assassin.prefs.conf.
>But in doing so, you're assuming the user has no NFS shares.
>  
>
Which is true in virtually all novice-user cases.
Users like you can easily undo anything I've done that you don't like. 
I'm trying to make it easier for the vast bulk of MailScanner users who 
don't know much about Unix and like having everything done for them. How 
many MailScanner admins don't even know what NFS is? I suspect the 
answer is at least "most".

>Many of these options aren't really mailscanner specific, but site
>implementation specific.
>  
>
Agreed, but that's not the point.

>It might be nice to provide a "suggested" mailscanner.cf file for people to use,
>but I largely don't see the point of MailScanner's installation specifying
>bayes_paths, lock_method, dcc_path, etc as it does now. In general, many of
>these have done me more harm than good.
>  
>
You're not the type of user I need to worry about, you know enough to 
easily fix anything I have done that you don't like.

>The only major option I see of as having any value is the "use_auto_whitelist"
>However, that's largely moot now.
>
>1) the AWL was fixed to avoid some of the problems I cited in it long ago, so I
>feel much less strongly about the problems of site-wide AWL usage.
>
>2) the AWL is a plugin as of 3.1.0, so this option isn't the preferred way of
>disabling the AWL. It's preferred to not load the module at all, saving memory.
>And, for anyone who has done it the preferred way, this option will cause parse
>errors.
>  
>
Fair enough.

>
>
>  
>
>>Is there any way of
>>(a) telling SpamAssassin to use spam.assassin.prefs.conf as a site-wide
>>settings file,
>>or
>>(b) working out automatically exactly where the site-wide settings
>>should go on any given installation. On things like Solaris the correct
>>location is damn near impossible to find. 
>>    
>>
>
>Can you access the $siterules member of Mail::SpamAssassin? I don't know enough
>perl to tell the difference between public and private, but this is where
>Mail::SpamAssassin stores what site rules directory it's actively using.
>  
>
Can you double check that please?

use Mail::SpamAssassin;
$a = new Mail::SpamAssassin;
print "site rules is \"" . $a->{siterules} . "\"\n";
produces
site rules is ""
so it's not called "siterules". Please can you provide me a code snippet 
(requiring no external configs) that produces the text you are looking for.

>
>Telling people to go and edit
>  
>
>>their site-wide SpamAssassin settings file is not much use. I need to be
>>able to work out the precise location of the best file to use, and do
>>the necessary editing for them in the install script. That's why I have
>>always done it the way I have. It pretty much worked okay, and the file
>>was in an easy-to-find location that (1) I could work out and (2) users
>>would be able to find it again later if they needed to change something
>>6 months later when they had forgotten what the install script told them.
>>    
>>
>
>IMHO, you're doing a bit too much for the user, and running into problems you
>shouldn't be having in the first place.
>  
>
In my book, doing too much for user is pretty much impossible. Anything 
else, and you are expecting too much from the user. Assume they don't 
know how to use a keyboard and you won't go far wrong.

>>An ideal solution would be a soft-link in the MailScanner/etc directory
>>to the real location of the file. But I still have to find the real file.
>>

-- 
Julian Field
www.MailScanner.info
Buy the MailScanner book at www.MailScanner.info/store
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