Re: default MTA

[Ian Campbell <ijc@hellion.org.uk>]

On Wed, 2013-06-12 at 23:50 -0400, Chris Knadle wrote:
> One snag I ran into concerning the abstraction layer concerned customizing the 
> "split file" configuration via conf.d/ files.  Upon upgrades dpkg recongizes 
> the changes in configuration files and prompts the user; choosing not to 
> replace the file with the maintain'er sversion drops a new .dpkg-dist file 
> next to the modified one, which is expected.  However what's _not_ expected is 
> to use both the customized configuration file as well as the .dpkg-dist one.  
> :-/  Unfortunately in my experience, that's what happens.  And in this 
> condition Exim may fail to start, or might start and then reject mail with a 
> temporary failure.  I therefore consider the "split configuration" to be 
> dangerous.
> 
> I had another look at this: it appears that in /usr/sbin/update-exim4.conf, 
> the cat_parts() function doesn't avoid files containing ".dpkg-", but this 
> funtionality might be able to be added to the run_parts() function that 
> cat_parts() uses.

This sounds quite obviously like a bug to me, did you report it?

I've just tried this on Wheezy and stuff written in
in /etc/exim4/conf.d/acl/00-test.dpkg-dist didn't get included:
        $ sudo update-exim4.conf  --verbose
        using split configuration scheme from /etc/exim4/conf.d
        internal run-parts: ignoring file: /etc/exim4/conf.d/acl/00-test.dpkg-dist

So it seems it has already been fixed.

Ian.