Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> writes:

> If we instead take the Conflicts seriously, then switching between MTAs
> requires the following sequences of events:

> deconfigure packages that pre-depend or depend on mail-transport-agent
> remove the old mail-transport-agent
> unpack the new mail-transport-agent
> configure in the appropriate order

> This looks like an awfully slow way to accomplish a task that would
> probably be dealt with better by triggering on /etc/aliases. But that
> is probably something to propose for squeeze+2 or so.

I think what happens in practice in this case is that apt calls dpkg with
some --force-* flag, or at least that's what the messages that I've seen
scroll by in this sort of situation seem to imply. I agree that it would
be good to have a better way of handling it (although also agree that's a
different bug than this one).

--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>


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(-cc: the bug. Sorry about that tangent.)

Bill Allombert wrote:

> Another issue is that only one MTA can be listening on port 25 at any time, and Debian
> does not provide a way to prevent two packages to be configured to listen on the same
> port.

That is a good point, and one that I do not think could not be solved
with triggers. So packages that require an MTA (like fcron) really
need to stop while switching MTAs, or they can find themselves
without a sendmail to talk to (and, in the case of fcron, lose
output from jobs).

Thanks. Will think more.


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