Re: Debian i386 freeze
On Fri, 17 Jul 1998, Brian White wrote:
> > > > Package: smail
> > > > Maintainer: Soenke Lange
> > > > 23717 smail: smtp entry in inetd.conf gone after smail upgrade
> > >
> > > Fixed in latest upload.
> >
> > Are you sure? I couldn't find any reference to that in the changelog.
>
> Sorry. You are correct. Is this reproduceable? I find it unlikely that
> it only happened to one person.
I am the submitter of that bug. This is what happened: after having kept
smail back at version 3.2.0.92 for a long time because all later versions
were unusable behind a firewall without nameresolving for the outside net,
I promised Soenke that I'd test smail one more time before installing
sendmail. Because I kept smail back for such a long time, it would be a
near bo->hamm smail upgrade, which seemed to me a good thing to test,
also considering the fact that I'm part of the testing team.
So I went about carefully looking at the pre- and post-upgrade situations.
Because of this I was lucky to notice almost immediately that there was
nothing answering on port 25 after the upgrade, because there was no line
in /etc/inetd.conf for smtp services at all anymore. I admit not having
investigated thoroughly into the smail pre- and postinst scripts, but upon
filing a bug with considerable severity, nothing was ever heard back from
the smail maintainer.
> Smail should be a pretty popular package.
As it seems it is not with people who are very knowledgable about MTA
issues. Sendmail, qmail, exim, vmailer, you name it are more popular
among Debian developers it seems. I've asked around a few times on
#Debian, but I found only one person willing to attest that he used smail.
The common sentiment seems to be that issues involving smail "don't matter
really, because Debian will switch to exim Real Soon Now anyway."
It _is_ highly likely a very "popular" mailer among newbies, because it is
installed at installation time and unless you choose another mta at that
moment, installing another one is not trivial.
> > > > Package: xbase
> > > > Maintainer: Branden Robinson
> > > > 24642 XF86Setup doesn't run: the file /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xinit/xi
> > >
> > > I'm still waiting to hear from Branden about this one.
> >
> > Branden has built a new X which people on #debian are currently testing.
> > It's available at http://master.debian.org/~branden/xfree86 . For all
> > you apt-fans out there:
> > deb http://master.debian.org/%7Ebranden/ xfree86/
>
> I should drop in...
When running apt-get upgrade in an xterm, I was asked if it was okay to
stop xdm and I answered no, meaning to close open apps gracefully and
finish the xbase upgrade from the console with "dpkg --configure
--pending", as I had done several times before. However, this time it did
not work anymore. Apparently, only xbase.postinst is run and there it
fails because xdm is still running. One needs to run "xbase.preinst
upgrade" by hand before "dpkg --configure" succeeds. The changelog on
the webpage does not mention a fix for that yet.
Cheers,
Joost
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