Re: Request for virtual package ircd

[Ian Jackson <ian@davenant.greenend.org.uk>]

Russ Allbery writes ("Re: Request for virtual package ircd"):
> Steve Langasek <vorlon@debian.org> writes:
> > m-t-a's must conflict because they are required by policy to provide a
> > sendmail program at a fixed filesystem location.
> 
> I was about to say the same thing earlier, but then realized that we
> *could* deal with that via alternatives.  And there's actually some appeal
> to that in some very limited situations.

When I changed from smail to exim on chiark, I used --force-conflicts
to install both, so that smail could empty its queue while exim
handled new messages.  This worked rather well.

I have no idea whether it would work nowadays; things are always much
more complicated now ...

Ian.