Re: [exim] Support Vacuum

Top Page
Delete this message
Reply to this message
Author: Marc Haber
Date:  
To: exim-users
Subject: Re: [exim] Support Vacuum
On Mon, 06 Nov 2006 12:38:23 +0100, Renaud Allard <renaud@???>
wrote:
>It should be noted that exim4 on debian supports the one large conf
>file. If you put any valid exim configuration file in
>/etc/exim4/exim4.conf debian exim will use it as its configuration file.


Yes, but that is not adviseable for a newbie. Please do not recommend
this to somebody who is not clearly experienced with exim.

>The large config format the only way I ever used to configure exim on
>debian systems, and this way should be supported by exim mailing list as
>it's the same as the "regular" way of doing config (except for config
>file place and name).


Agreed. As soon as there is an /etc/exim4/exim4.conf, Debian support
ceases, and the user's system is a plain exim modulo some paths. So,
these people should get support here.

>Also for people who tell exim3 is still shipped by debian, it will only
>be shipped by debian if you upgrade from an old debian which used exim3
>to a new one.


exim 3 is still _SHIPPED_ by Debian, but only installed when upgrading
from an older version of the distribution. New stable installs done
later than June 2005 have exim4.

> So it's probably better to tell them to *fully* upgrade
>their installation by running "apt-get install exim4-daemon-heavy".
>There is a debian script which will try to convert old exim3 configs to
>new exim4 configs when you do the upgrade (better try before prod :)).


I am now quoting from
http://pkg-exim4.alioth.debian.org/README/README.Debian.html#id224542:

<quote>
If you use exim4-config from Debian, you'll get the debconf based
configuration scheme that is intended to cover the majority of cases.

If exim4-config is installed while an exim 3 package is present on the
system, exim4-config tries to parse the exim 3 config file to
determine the answers that were given to eximconfig on exim 3
installation. These answers are then taken as default values for the
debconf based configuration process. Be warned! eximconfig from the
exim 3 packages doesn't record the explicit answers given on exim 3
configuration. So we have to guess the answers from the exim 3
configuration file /etc/exim/exim.conf, which is bound to fail if the
config file has been modified after using eximconfig.

This is the reason why we refrained from doing a "silent update", but
only use the guessed answers to get reasonable defaults for our
debconf based configuration process.

Please note that we do not use the exim_convert4r4 script, but try to
configure the exim 4 package in the same way exim 3 was. This will
hopefully aid future updates.

If you have used a customized exim 3 configuration, you can of course
use exim_convert4r4, and install the resulting file as
/etc/exim4/exim4.conf after careful inspection. exim4 will then use
that file and ignore the file that it generated from the debconf
configuration. To aid future updates, we do, however, encourage you
not to use the exim_convert4r4-generated file verbatim but instead
drop appropriate configuration snippets in their appropriate place in
/etc/exim4/conf.d.
</quote>

>The exim4 package is far less messed up by debian than the apache2 package.


Thanks for the compliments. Actually, I like the way that Debian has
packaged apache2 as it is flexible, easy to use and has great
potential for automating things.

Greetings
Marc

-- 
-------------------------------------- !! No courtesy copies, please !! -----
Marc Haber         |   " Questions are the         | Mailadresse im Header
Mannheim, Germany  |     Beginning of Wisdom "     | http://www.zugschlus.de/
Nordisch by Nature | Lt. Worf, TNG "Rightful Heir" | Fon: *49 621 72739834