[Mimedefang] Spamassassin Removal?

[Kris Deugau]

postfix--- via MIMEDefang wrote:
> I installed mimedefang on a RHEL8 flavor using dnf repos. As part of the 
> install it installed spamassassin as a dependency. I will not be using 
> spamassassin would like to uninstall it. Using dnf it wont remove it 
> without also removing mimedefang. Is there a safe way to rip out 
> spamassassin? Or is there a way to install mimedefang using dnf without 
> including spamassassin?

When you install a package, you're usually stuck with whatever hard 
dependencies are set in the package.  "rpm -qi mimedefang" should tell 
you whether SA is in the "Requires" (hard dependency) or "Recommends" 
(soft dependency) list.

Arguably the MIMEDefang package is in error by hard-depending on 
SpamAssassin, since as in your case it's not always wanted.  (Or may be 
used in a different configuration - we call SA from MD by way of spamc 
connecting to a central SA host instead of using the SA Perl library 
interface.  A MD package depending on the full SA package wouldn't work 
well for us either.)

After a bit of searching the more appropriate "Recommends" dependency 
type should be allowed in the package's .spec file by a new enough 
rpmbuild, and supported for installation by a new enough dnf, but it's 
up to the package maintainer to put SA in that set.

Try removing SA, or maybe read through the man page for dnf to see if 
you can disable "Recommends" on a per-case or systemwide basis.

-kgd