We had a consultant come in years ago and configure our Procurve switches, after we installed fiber optic cabling between all of our buildings. He configured 2 fiber ports in one uplink to another building as a trunk port, and enabled Spanning Tree when he did so. He said at the time that this was a necessary part of port trunking, but the more I read up on it, the more I get the impression that these are two distinct features that can operate completely independently of each other. What say you?
It is certainly not required for trunking at all, as you suspect these are completely separate features. STP is good for preventing loops on access ports and networks with redundant links or for using load-sharing across multiple switches (with MSTP instances) in the absence of distributed trunking or other similar features... but in this case, if you're sure there will never be any loops on the trunk between the buildings you are better off disabling it there with a bpdu-filter.
