This is a custom-hack setup of UW imap.  The regular usage is to have it
started from xinetd, and that is what we support.  By removing this requires
from the package, what will happen is users will potentially be able to
install imap without installing xinetd and then report bugs to us that it
doesn't work.

I consider your usage of imap to be very special case and not general purpose
at all.  The default package setup should be to have imap set up with xinetd
as the supported mechanism for starting imap.  Also, xinetd should be installed
on every system anyway.  Simply install xinetd and your problem is solved.

Lets not complicate matters for the common case.

Since I'd much rather be able to install a firewall with a `minimal install'
(i.e., without xinetd) while still being able to have a command line imap, how
about splitting the imap binary into a separate binary package, that the main
binary package containing the xinetd settings would then Require?  I would
provide a patch for the spec file, if you agree to this solution.

Splitting the package up for something this trivial really isn't worth it.
If you're concerned about the security of xinetd being installed on a
*firewall*, you really should be much more concerned about the security
of imap itself.  It is quite shoddy code, and has a number of security
problems which are basically non-fixable without completely redesigning the
application.

I'm not quite sure what fetchmail using imap protocol has to do with the
UW imap package though either.  I use fetchmail + imap/imaps daily.

$ rpm -q --whatrequires imap
no package requires imap

This is just asking for package splitup bloat IMHO for no real gain to the
overwhelming majority of RHL/RHEL users.

Well, imap invoked from the command line still runs as the user who started it,
in pre-authenticated mode, whereas imap started from xinetd runs as root, which
is *far* more insecure.

pts/11 mharris@devserv:~$ ps aux  |grep [i]mapd
jlaska   26724  1.3  0.1  4804 2816 ?        S    08:18   3:20 imapd
mikem    26781  0.0  0.1  4944 3228 ?        S    11:17   0:00 imapd
blizzard  9588  0.0  0.1  4372 2652 ?        S    11:44   0:00 imapd
benl     14654  0.0  0.1  4256 2592 ?        S    11:53   0:02 imapd
blizzard 17689  0.0  0.1  4188 2460 ?        S    12:02   0:00 imapd
blizzard 21145  0.0  0.1  4168 2444 ?        S    12:09   0:00 imapd

I don't see imapd running as root.

Really though, anyone ultimately concerned about security, wouldn't be
running ANY imap server on their firewall.  A firewall is a firewall, not
an imap server.  UW imap is the last thing I'd want to run in a secure
environment anyway.  Try using dovecot instead, it's part of the distribution
too now (and running on devserv also).  There's also courier-imap and 
cyrus to choose from, although they're not in the distro.

See, the thing is exactly that I don't want imap to run as a daemon, because
xinetd starts it as root.  Running it from the command line, as a non-root user,
it enters pre-authenticated mode, and that's something far less disruptive to
run to collect e-mail delivered locally to a firewall box.  I'll check whether
any of the other imap implementations you mentioned offer preauth mode.  Last I
looked, only UW imap did it.

/usr/libexec/dovecot/imap as in FC1 can be used for preauth imap, yay!