SA rules_du_jour lint bug: FOUND

[Jeff A. Earickson]

Gang,

I upgraded to SA 3.1.4 last night, and continued to be plagued by
lint failures in the rules_du_jour script, like so:

/opt/perl5/bin/spamassassin -p /opt/MailScanner/etc/spam.assassin.prefs.conf --lint
[27791] warn: config: SpamAssassin failed to parse line, "/var/spool/spamassassin" is not valid for "bayes_path", skipping: bayes_path /var/spool/spamassassin

I had this problem in earlier versions of SA, but had worked around
it by having a different spam.assassin.prefs.conf with no bayes_path
entry.  This hack quit working with 3.1.4.

I found where the problem is in the SpamAssassin code.  The following
diff to [perlpath]/5.8.8/Mail/SpamAssassin/Conf.pm "fixes" the problem:

*** Conf.pm.orig        Thu Aug  3 11:49:37 2006
--- Conf.pm.new Thu Aug  3 12:04:24 2006
***************
*** 2239,2246 ****
         unless (defined $value && $value !~ /^$/) {
         return $MISSING_REQUIRED_VALUE;
         }
!       if (-d $value) {
!       return $INVALID_VALUE;
         }
        $self->{bayes_path} = $value;
       }
--- 2239,2246 ----
         unless (defined $value && $value !~ /^$/) {
         return $MISSING_REQUIRED_VALUE;
         }
!       if (-f $value) {
!               return $INVALID_VALUE;
         }
        $self->{bayes_path} = $value;
       }

I know this isn't quite right, since the test should be "if NOT a
directory, return INVALID_VALUE".  But the code:

if ( ! -d $value)

didn't work correctly.  Anyway, this clearly seems to be a bug
in SpamAssassin.

Since I'm not a subscriber to SpamAssassin-dev, would somebody
else (Raymond?) care to post this bug to the SA developers?

Jeff Earickson
Colby College