ssmtp-config fails on step 6

[Doug Henderson]

On Fri, 19 Nov 2021 at 17:21, Andrey Repin via Cygwin <cygwin@cygwin.com> wrote:
>
> Greetings, Kevin Andrew Lipscomb!
>
> > ssmtp-config fails silently on step 6 at the first call to /usr/sbin/alternatives.
>
> > I isolated the alternatives command, added the --verbose switch to it, and
> > ran the result from a bash shell that was launched as Administrator.  The
> > command fails immediately after emitting:
>
> >    reading /var/lib/alternatives/mta
>
> > I am also reporting this as a bug in alternatives at bugzilla.redhat.com.


> alternatives is known to make links to nonexistent objects. While this is
> possible on *NIX, you can only link to existing objects on Windows.


If that is the case, a possible workaround is to issue the following
command from an elevated shell

touch /var/lib/alternatives/mta

and make sure the ownership and permissions are identical to the other
files, e.g. in my case:

$ ls -l /var/lib/alternatives
total 8.0K
-rw-r--r--+ 1 Admin None  41 Jul 16 11:25 2to3
-rw-r--r--+ 1 Admin None  52 Jul 16 11:25 gnuplot
-rw-r--r--+ 1 Admin None 218 Jun 16 17:48 lua
-rw-r--r--+ 1 Admin None  77 Jun  5 08:46 pip3
-rw-r--r--+ 1 Admin None  85 Jun  5 08:46 pydoc3
-rw-r--r--+ 1 Admin None 110 Jun 16 07:34 python
-rw-r--r--+ 1 Admin None  89 Jun  5 08:46 python3
-rw-r--r--+ 1 Admin None  59 Jul 16 11:25 python3-config

-- 
Doug Henderson, Calgary, Alberta, Canada - from gmail.com