Bug#843658: sendmail-cf: Customized sendmail.cf is being overwritten on startup

[Andreas Beckmann <anbe@debian.org>]

On 2016-11-08 20:38, Thomas - In:Quality wrote:
> That disclaimer is of limited use for people who bring their own
> sendmail.cf. ;-) It's a very old and possibly bad habit, but it has not
> been a problem for many years,

I can easily reproduce your problems in minimal chroots with

apt-get install sendmail
$EDITOR /etc/mail/sendmail.cf
apt-get reinstall sendmail-bin

That regenerates sendmail.cf, removing any customization (well, I only
tested with comments) while nothing of the *.m4 has changed (but perhaps
something gets touched?).
But this "works" in wheezy, jessie and stretch, so it probably has
worked always in that way.

> and I don't even see the point of
> rebuilding the file unless there was an update to the m4 stuff. Maybe
> "make" can be limited to just the database files for startup?

I have no clue how that configuration setup actually works in the Debian
package :-(


Andreas