Hi,
While installing a new system, I was bitten by #253513 which lead me to
wonder how I had ended up with mailutils rather than bsd-mailx.
It seems that this was the result of installing emacs, which pulled in
exim4 and thus exim4-base, which recommends the virtual package 'mailx'
which is provided by mailutils.
Declarations of a relationship to mailx (sorted by frequency)[1]:
22 bsd-mailx | mailx
9 mailx
3 heirloom-mailx | mailx
2 mailx | mailutils
2 mailutils | mailx
2 bsd-mailx | mailx | mailutils
1 s-nail | mailx
1 mutt | mailx | mail-transport-agent
1 heirloom-mailx | bsd-mailx | mailx
1 heirloom-mailx | biabam | mutt
1 exim4 | mail-transport-agent | mailutils | bsd-mailx | mailx
1 bsd-mailx | mailutils | s-nail | mailx
It seems that most (26) packages are explicitly preferring bsd-mailx,
which seems fair enough to me.
heirloom-mailx is a dummy package that depends on s-nail, where s-nail
does not actually provide mailx, so I suspect that mentions of both of
those could be bugs.
The most popular remaining option is to list mailx before any real
package, which is presumably what leads to the unexpected behaviour.
As far as I can see, mailutils is only explicitly preferred to bsd-mailx
in three cases:
fwanalog & wims Depends: mailutils | mailx
debarchiver Recommends: exim4 | mail-transport-agent | mailutils | bsd-mailx | mailx
Given that, it seems to me that we should somehow ensure that when one
needs 'mailx' one can be sure to get bsd-mailx (unless one explicitly
chooses otherwise).
However, hard-wiring this preference into so many packages doesn't seem
very elegant to me, and would be a pain to change if we ever wanted to
switch defaults.
Is there perhaps some trick in apt that could fix this so that the
packages only need to depend on mailx?
Alternatively, might a 'default-mailx' virtual package that only
bsd-mailx provides be the answer, such that all of these then could
declare the dependency as: default-mailx | mailx
Can anyone suggest a better way of making bsd-mailx the
distribution-wide preference for satisfying dependencies on mailx?
Cheers, Phil.
[1] FYI the above figures were arrived at by using these commands:
for i in $(apt-cache showpkg mailx | sed -ne 's/ \([^ ,]*\)\b.*/\1/p' | sort -u) ; do apt-cache show $i | sed -ne 's/^\(D\|R\|S\)\(epend\|ecommend\|uggest*\)s: \(\|.*, *\)\([^,]*mailx[^,]*\)\(.*\)$/\4:'"$i"'[\1]/p' ; done | sort -V -u > /tmp/mailx-deps.txt
cut -d: -f1 /tmp/mailx-deps.txt | uniq -c | sort -nr
The longer list is here:
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bsd-mailx | mailutils | s-nail | mailx:rkhunter[R] bsd-mailx | mailx | mailutils:backupninja[D] bsd-mailx | mailx | mailutils:psad[D] bsd-mailx | mailx:aide-common[D] bsd-mailx | mailx:amanda-common[D] bsd-mailx | mailx:amanda-server[D] bsd-mailx | mailx:apticron-systemd[D] bsd-mailx | mailx:apticron[D] bsd-mailx | mailx:automysqlbackup[D] bsd-mailx | mailx:bacula-director[D] bsd-mailx | mailx:bareos-director[D] bsd-mailx | mailx:devscripts[S] bsd-mailx | mailx:fcheck[D] bsd-mailx | mailx:gridengine-common[D] bsd-mailx | mailx:hylafax-server[D] bsd-mailx | mailx:icinga-common[D] bsd-mailx | mailx:inn[D] bsd-mailx | mailx:libapache2-mod-evasive[D] bsd-mailx | mailx:logrotate[R] bsd-mailx | mailx:nagios4-common[D] bsd-mailx | mailx:reboot-notifier[D] bsd-mailx | mailx:sharutils[S] bsd-mailx | mailx:ssl-cert-check[R] bsd-mailx | mailx:ui-auto[D] bsd-mailx | mailx:uucp[D] exim4 | mail-transport-agent | mailutils | bsd-mailx | mailx:debarchiver[R] heirloom-mailx | biabam | mutt:autopostgresqlbackup[R] heirloom-mailx | bsd-mailx | mailx:aptitude-robot[S] heirloom-mailx | mailx:autopostgresqlbackup[D] heirloom-mailx | mailx:drbd-utils[R] heirloom-mailx | mailx:sn[D] mailutils | mailx:fwanalog[D] mailutils | mailx:wims[D] mailx | mailutils:smartmontools[R] mailx | mailutils:smartmontools[S] mailx:bzr-email[S] mailx:cruft[S] mailx:exim4-base[R] mailx:fail2ban[S] mailx:integrit[R] mailx:mariadb-server-10.3[S] mailx:mpt-status[S] mailx:mysql-server-5.7[S] mailx:tua[D] mutt | mailx | mail-transport-agent:metche[D] s-nail | mailx:apcupsd[R]
-- |)| Philip Hands [+44 (0)20 8530 9560] HANDS.COM Ltd. |-| http://www.hands.com/ http://ftp.uk.debian.org/ |(| Hugo-Klemm-Strasse 34, 21075 Hamburg, GERMANY