Unnecessary dependency on mailx

[Bert Peters]

The package "libapache-mod-evasive" has a dependency on mailx to send email notifications. However, these notifications are an optional feature, a feature without which the package works just fine.

mailx is not that big of a package to install so it's not a problem. However, all of the packages providing it also depend on default-mta which my default installs postfix. Installing postfix or another MTA is generally not what you want unless you are really sure your system should send mail.

To mitigate this, I suggest downgrading mailx from a hard dependency to a recommended dependency. That way most people will still install it and get the default behaviour, but others who don't need it can avoid it.

A current workaround is to install lsb-invalid-mta, but that is not an ideal solution.

Ubuntu version:

Description: Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS
Release: 18.04

Package version: libapache-mod-evasive 1.10.1-3

Expected behaviour:

# apt install --no-install-recommends libapache-mod-evasive

The apache module is installed

Observed behaviour:

# apt install --no-install-recommends libapache-mod-evasive

The module is installed, but so is postfix.

[Tony den Haan (txa-tony)]

There's an addititional problem though: to make mod_evasive send mails properly it should be using mailx -t, but that'd most likely break alternatives.