[posted and mailed]
mh+exim-users@??? (Marc Haber) wrote in
<E18mZGR-0006W4-00@???>:
>The Debian exim 4 maintainer team proudly announces the upload of the
>first version of Debian exim 4 packages to Debian experimental.
>
>Highlights of the package include:
>- Fully debconf-driven configuration
>- Multiple daemon flavours for different environments in different
> daemon packages. If somebody doesn't like our choice of features,
> the infrastructure to build an exim4-daemon-custom package according
> to the local user's choice is present in the source package.
>- extremely flexible configuration schemes. The entire configuration
> can be pulled in from a different Debian package, making our exim 4
> package nice to support for larger installations.
>- TLS support using GnuTLS.
>- MySQl, Postgresql, LDAP support
>- Marc Merlin's dlopen patch has been applied
>CAUTION: These are experimental packages. If they break, you get to
>keep both pieces.
>Any feedback about the packages is most welcome.
I've got some feedback. My selective quoting above highlights that I want to:
* build a "custom" daemon (need SSL support for connecting to my ISP).
* want to keep the heaviness down, running on old hardware.
* learn the newest exim rather than learn exim3. IOW, I am a new exim
user and have no investment in learning curve on exim3.
I applaud the team that made this experimental release available.
I think I have a package bug to report, though.
Following all instructions, I thought I had built .debs cleanly. I downloaded
the source (.dsc, .orig.gz, .diff.gz) for exim4-4.14 from the Debian mirror I
use. I unpacked the source in the usual way, cd'd into the tree and went to
work. I read "debian/rules" and issued the command
# fakeroot debian/rules unpack_config
or something close to that (sorry! it isn't laziness, I cannot access my logs
from this OS [multiboot] -- I expect the knowledeable reader will be able to
grasp what I mean).
I edited the EDITME_custom (whatever) file, which was cp'd from EDITME_daemon-
lite (or whatever). I choose what I needed.
I ran the main build of the pkg:
# fakeroot debian/rules builddaemon[...]=custom base[?]
# fakeroot debian/rules "" "" "" "" "" binary[?] blah foo...
Or something like that. I got 3 packages placed in the parent-level dir, a
"exim4-4.14[...].deb" and a daemon .deb. I had downloaded the non-compileable
all-arch "exim4-config[...].deb" package also (no source files for that one).
My installation failure seems AFAICT to be due to the "exim4-config" .deb
package, not to the stuff I built from source (which supplies exim4daemon and
exim4base). When installing I used apt-get in the canonical manner (after
moving the .deb files to a local repository area I created for home-built
.debs and editing my /etc/apt/sources.list file to reflect that, and running
'apt-get update').
The debconf preconfigure session seemed to run to satisfactory completion. The
apt tried to install the packages and dpkg run by apt choked when it came time
to run the actual configuration of exim4-config: it complained of missing
commands and exited with a non-zero retval.
What was missing were two tools that should be familiar to the Debian
packagers:
* update-exim4defaults
* update-exim4.conf
I found that the src tree for exim4 held in the debian subdir, a shell script
named "update-exim4defaults", so I cp'd it to /usr/sbin and chmod'd it, and
that let me get just one step further in the repeated attempts to get apt/dpkg
to configure the package (and its dependencies). But NOWHERE in any Debian
package of release "exim4-4.14" did I find any such file as "update-
exim4.conf". The *manpages* for both those scripts ARE installed by the
package but NOT the executables themselves; in fact they seem to be simply not
present in the distros.
As a result I have done what is supposed to be the hardest part of building a
package from src: all the customization, reading of readmes and build
configuration, setting up of apt to know where to get the newly-built
packages, but am stopped when almost at the finish line by a glitch in the
package installation time configuration mechanlism, that MAY be due to a
operator error in the creation of the .deb and src uploads to the Debian
archive.
I would love some help, Thx!
Soren Andersen
{{ Hoping next time you hear from me to be emailing from mutt }}
