Re: replacing the standard mta with qmail (Re: Question about dselect)
On Mon, 8 Nov 1999, Joost Kooij wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Sun, 7 Nov 1999, Bastard Operator From Hell wrote:
>
> > I recently replaced exim with qmail as that is what I have to administer at
> > work and I would rather glitch something up at home vs on-the-job.
>
> There is some additional effort required to install qmail, you have to
> compile your own debs, as the licence prohibits distributing those.
>
> Because of this, dselect doesn't know about the qmail debs in the same way
> as it knows about the regular debs from the debian archive.
You can alway create a local package repository with which you can use
dselect. It is quite easy, to tell the truth:
1. create a directory B in any directory A.
2. put all packages you have built in directory B. Don't maintain section
hierarchy. If you want to, then use the appropriate switch for
dpkg-scanpackages in step 4.
3. put the following line in /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb file:/A/ B/
(of course replace A and B, and keep the space before B)
4. cd A
dpkg-scanpackages B /dev/null > B/Packages
Execute step 4. if you have put or taken any packages to/from the
directory B.
After this you can switch to apt retrieve method in dselect, and it will
see your packages. Probably you should download the latest apt for your
distribution. It is somewhere around 0.3.10slink11 for slink and I don't
know where I got it from. For potato just download it from the debian
mirror of your choice.
> > Slight problem though, when I removed exim, dselect also wanted to remove
> > all of my MTA and mail related packages (i.e.: af, anacron, at, elm-me+,
> > fmirror, logrotate, mailx and mutt), so of course, I exited the Select
> > phase of dselect with the "Q" option to force it to ignore the depends.
>
> You should not use dselect to replace your mta. Dselect is a great tool
> to manage dependencies, but in this case, you really want to _work_around_
> dependencies, making dselect the wrong tool for this particular job.
>
> You can not (easily anyway[1]) use dselect to install qmail, because there
> is no archive containing pre-built qmail.deb.
You can do it the way I described previously. You just select exim for
purging and select qmail and ucspi-tcp for installing. You should probably
install dot-forward as well if you have users with .forward files.
Take care to use ucspi-tcp 0.84 for qmail 1.03.
> ...
> That's all there should be to it. Now, you can continue using dselect for
> all you daily updates and standard package installations and removals. The
> only package that it cannot update automatically is qmail, because there
> is no qmail.deb in the archive.
>
It does not really evolve too fast anyway :)
> ...
> Notice that when you run dselect, it will show the "installed" status of
> the qmail package, but it knows only the installed version, not the
> available version, because there is no "official archive" version of the
> qmail.deb. For the same reason, dselect classifies the package as
> "Obsolete/local Unclassified packages without a section". This is nothing
> to worry about.
It does not come up if you create a proper local repository :)
Robert Varga
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