[Evolution] bogofilter integration

[Paul Smith <paul mad-scientist net>]

Hi all.  I'm trying to push to get some kind of resolution to the
"bogofilter problem" put into Ubuntu 15.04, if possible.  I'm using
Ubuntu GNOME as my distro for now and the only real issue I have is that
Evo's bogofilter plugin is not supported:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/evolution/+bug/1247366

The problem seems fairly well understood, and it's a packaging snafu:

https://mail.gnome.org/archives/evolution-list/2014-May/msg00010.html
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-desktop/2015-January/004618.html
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-gnome/2015-January/002755.html

This last message implies that not only can Ubuntu not have run-time
dependencies between Evo and bogofilter, there can't even be
_build-time_ dependencies between them.  Hence, they are currently
configuring with --disable-bogofilter.

My understanding is that Evo doesn't actually link with any "bogofilter
shared library" or anything, it's just running the program.  True?

If so, it seems like this should be a straightforward problem to solve.
Is there any way to get the configure to succeed even if bogofilter is
not found during configure?  For example, if we explicitly configure
with --enable-bogofilter perhaps it could skip the checks and just turn
on support?

If not would it be possible to trick the configure somehow, so that it
didn't fail but still looked for bogofilter in the right place at
runtime (without having to install a shim script there first ideally)?

It seems to me that ideally this would be a runtime check, not a
compile-time check: at runtime the plugin looks to see if the bogofilter
program is available and if so the plugin is enabled, if not it's not.
But maybe there are complexities that make that hard.