Equivs and Mail problem

[Damon Muller <damon@empire.net.au>]

Hi Folks,

I wanted to get rid of exim install qmail. I didn't want to use the
qmail src deb, because it's only 1.02, so I got the source and compiled
it myself.

Now, obviously a lot of things are going to complain loudly if I get rid
of my MTA, so acting on something I saw on the list, I used the equivs
package to provide an equiv for mail-transport-agent.

I think I did the quivs correctly. In /etc/equivs.conf I have:

$ cat /etc/equivs.conf 
mail-transport-agent

I installed the resulting deb file. When I have a look at the deb file
in mc it says "Provides: mail-transport-agent".

I uninstalled --force-deps exim and installed the equivs deb. It all
seemed to work nicely.

Yet when I recently ran apt-get update, this is what I got:

$ sudo apt-get update
Get http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au stable/non-US Packages
Get http://snowcrash.tdyc.com slink/rkrusty Packages                     
Get http://www.debian.org unstable/main Packages                             

Get http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au dists/proposed-updates/ Packages             

Get http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au stable/contrib Packages
Get http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au stable/main Packages                
Get http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au stable/non-free Packages
Fetched 2266k in 1m57s (19.4k/s)                                             

Updating package file cache...done
Updating package status cache...done
Checking system integrity...dependency error
You might want to run `apt-get -f install' to correct these.
Sorry, but the following packages are broken - this means they have unmet
dependencies:
  maildrop: Depends:mail-transport-agent
  anacron: Depends:smail Depends:sendmail Depends:mail-transport-agent
  mutt: Depends:mail-transport-agent
  mailx: Depends:smail Depends:mail-transport-agent
  elm-me+: Depends:mail-transport-agent
  mailto: Depends:mail-transport-agent
$ 

Why am I getting all those unresolved dependencies? I thought that was
what equivs was for?

Any suggestions? What have I done wrong?

--
Damon Muller              | Did a large procession wave their torches
(damon@empire.net.au)     | As my head fell in the basket,
Network Administrator     | And was everyone dancing on the casket...
EmpireNET                 |                      - TBMG, "Dead"