MTA packaging (exim, postfix, sendmail, ssmtp)

[D. Boland]

Hi Yaakov,

Yaakov Selkowitz wrote:
> 
> Corinna, Christian, Daniel, Pierre,
> 
> Because MTAs must be user-configured, and we certainly don't want to
> lose the selection during package upgrades, the alternatives cannot be
> handled in package postinst/prerm.  I think the only way to make this
> work is for each MTA config script to handle these instead by including
> the following snippets in the respective MTA config scripts.
> 
> Please review this carefully in case I missed anything.
> 
> sendmail:
> ========
> 
> /usr/sbin/alternatives --install /usr/sbin/sendmail mta
> /usr/sbin/sendmail-real.exe 0 \
>         --slave /usr/lib/sendmail mta-sendmail /usr/sbin/sendmail-real.exe \
>         --slave /usr/bin/mailq mta-mailq /usr/sbin/sendmail-real.exe \
>         --slave /usr/bin/newaliases mta-newaliases /usr/sbin/sendmail-real.exe \
>         --slave /usr/bin/rmail mta-rmail /usr/sbin/sendmail-real.exe
> 
> /usr/sbin/alternatives --set mta /usr/sbin/sendmail-real.exe

Thanks. I will use these with a slight modification.

My source code is currently being used on Cygwin, Ubuntu, Lubuntu, Kubuntu, Debian
and Suze. So I already had to come up with a solution which would work for all of
these systems. My solution is to install the Sendmail binary into /usr/libexec. This
works beautifully, because now the "shared namespace" /usr/sbin/sendmail can be
overwritten, without removing the actual binary.

Sincerely,
Daniel