RE: [ITP] Sendmail 8.14.9

["Pierre A. Humblet" <Pierre dot Humblet at ieee dot org>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From:  Yaakov Selkowitz
> Sent: Friday, August 22, 2014 17:40
> 
> On 2014-08-22 13:19, D. Boland wrote:
> >> On Aug 22 07:43, D. Boland wrote:
> >>> I re-packaged Sendmail with cygport. See:
> >>>
> >>> http://cygwin.boland.nl/x86/release/sendmail/
> >>
> >> Packaging looks good in theory.
> >>
> >> Unfortunately we have a problem.
> >>
> >> On inspection of your binary package I noticed that we have conflicts
> >> with exim and ssmtp packages:
> [snip]
> >> What we'll have to do to fix this problem is to convert all three
> >> packages to use alternatives.  The alternatives package exists and is
> >> already used by a couple of other packages which would otherwise
> >> conflict, so there's precendent.  And on Fedora, the various mail
> >> packages all use alternatives, too, to install their packages in
> >> parallel and conflict-free.
> [snip]
> >
> 
> > Why not let the user choose one program? Putting both Exim and
> > Sendmail on one box is confusing, to say the least. Sendmail is very
> > tough to understand. You don't want another (very similar looking) mail
> exchanger to add to the confusion.
> 
> Cygwin's setup*.exe does not support the concept of "conflicts" (one
> package blocking others from being installed), nor does it prevent file
> clobbering if multiple packages provide the same file.  Since there is no
way
> to stop multiple MTAs from being installed, it is necessary to insure that
they
> do so properly.
> 
> This needs to be handled properly, that's all, and that can take time.
> If Pierre doesn't respond soon, we can step in to help with exim.
 
I should have time one evening this week to do whatever it takes. 
However I am not sure we need alternatives to handle conflicts in this case.
In the exim package /usr/bin/mailq and /usr/bin/newaliases are just symbolic
links to exim (newaliases is just a noop provided only to keep some 3rd
party scripts from failing). It would be easy to pull them out of the
package and to recreate them under user control in the exim config script.
Hopefully other MTAs can do something similar.
The symbolic link /usr/sbin/sendmail is not used by exim. It can be set from
the exim config script to allow third party programs to find the local MTA.

Whatever we do should be transparent to users who have already installed
ssmtp or exim and are updating to a newer version.

Pierre