Re: apt-get'snt working

[Florian Kulzer <florian@molphys.leidenuniv.nl>]

On Mon, Jun 19, 2006 at 23:51:46 +0200, Fourat Zouari wrote:
> Am having problem with apt-get, it wont do anything, it seems that it have a
> pending job related to sendmail and it doesnt work for i dont know why, i
> have allways this message :

[...]

>   9. Paramétrage de sendmail-bin (8.13.7-1) ...
>   10. Saving old /etc/mail/sendmail.cf as /etc/mail/sendmail.cf.old ...
>   11. start-stop-daemon: need at least one of --exec, --pidfile or
>   --user
>   12. Try `start-stop-daemon --help' for more information.
>   13. dpkg : erreur de traitement de sendmail-bin (--configure) :
>   14.  le sous-processus post-installation script a retourné une erreur
>   de sortie d'état 2

That is where things go wrong. (The rest of the errors are problems of
packages that depend on sendmail-bin.) The post-installation script of
sendmail-bin seems to invoke the start-stop-daemon command without
providing a required argument. The script first checks all possible
locations of PID-files for sendmail and then does a "catch all" stop by
process name (lines 52 and 53):

start-stop-daemon --stop --oknodo --quiet \
                --name sendmail > /dev/null;

I think it could be fixed like this:

start-stop-daemon --stop --oknodo --quiet \
                --exec /usr/sbin/sendmail-mta > /dev/null;

Unfortunately I cannot try this right now. Maybe somebody else can test
it or suggest a better solution/workaround. (There is no bug reported
yet, at least not against sendmail-bin.)

-- 
Regards,
          Florian