In addition to the ability to manage a local mail spool file (which net-mail/mailbase would configure), mutt can work with POP3/IMAP and SMTP without any local mail server or spool files (it also can work with Maildirs setup via FUSE or similar). This means it is improper to depend on net-mail/mailbase without a USE flag, as it draws in unnecessary extra packages (specifically ones for a mail *server*). Note that other packages under net-mail, such as net-mail/thunderbird and net-mail/alpine do not depend on mail-base. Reproducible: Always
Shoot, I meant mail-client/thunderbird and mail-client/alpine. Even an extra proofread didn't catch that before hitting submit.
hmmm, yeah ok, I think this is a legacy dep, from the time when Mutt didn't support IMAP.
Ok, I checked this, and mailbase provides mailcap, which mutt uses to auto_view MIME parts. I don't see any dependencies for mailbase, except pam when USE=pam. net-mail/mailbase-1.5-r1: acct-user/mail acct-user/postmaster acct-group/mail virtual/pam All of these are just user groups, so no heavy dependencies or anything. Closing this bug for now. Please reopen/comment if you think I missed something.
