apt confusion

[Ben Browning]

Hey Alix,

The problem you are having is that exim provides a virtual package-
mail-transport-agent - that those services need

What I do to do this is as follows:

0) shutdown exim
1) Install qmail (I use lifewithqmail with my local modifications
spliced in)
2) Setup the sendmail symlinks
3) (IMPORTANT) dpkg-divert the sendmail symlinks. This will keep dpkg
(and thus apt) from overwriting them and will instead overwrite a
diversion file in the same dir
4) (IMPORTANT) change all /etc/rc#.d/S*exim4* links to K links. DONT
REMOVE THEM or apt will replace them when exim gets upgrades

At this point exim is disabled and qmail can go about its business
unimpeded.

The alternate many Debian purists will suggest is to create a "stub"
package for qmail with equivs that provides mail-transport-agent- If you
want to try that I have such a stub package up at
http://www.oz.net/~empty/equivs-qmail_1.0_all.deb . In my experience
though it's not a big difference one way or the other and you lose a few
things (notably for me the mail command, which I pipe a lot of crap to ;)

Hope this info helps!

~Ben
Alex Dean wrote:
> I want to remove the exim4 MTA so I can install qMail.  There seem to be
> some connections between packages that I don't understand, because every
> time I try to remove exim, it also removes MySQL, PostGres and a few
> others...
> 
>    # apt-get remove exim4-daemon-heavy
>    Reading Package Lists... Done
>    Building Dependency Tree... Done
>    The following packages will be REMOVED:
>      at courier-pop exim4-daemon-heavy mailman mailx mutt mysql-server-4.1
>      postgresql postgresql-contrib
> 
> This doesn't make any sense to me.  Why can't I just remove exim?
> 
> I thought 'OK, maybe I just have to remove it all for some reason, and
> then I can later re-install MySQL'.  But, when I do that, it also
> reinstalls exim!
> 
>    # apt-get install mysql-server-4.1
>    Reading Package Lists... Done
>    Building Dependency Tree... Done
>    The following extra packages will be installed:
>      exim4 exim4-daemon-light mailx
>    The following NEW packages will be installed:
>      exim4 exim4-daemon-light mailx mysql-server-4.1
> 
> Anyone have any ideas what's going on here? 
> http://packages.debian.org/stable/mail/exim4-daemon-heavy shows that
> 'exim4-daemon-heavy' depends on 'libmysqlclient12', which in turn
> depends on other MySQL packages, so I can see how installing exim might
> require MySQL.  But I don't see why installing MySQL requires exim. 
> Additionally, that's just 'exim4-daemon-heavy'.  When I just
> re-installed MySQL, apt installed 'exim4-daemon-light', which doesn't
> seem to have any MySQL dependencies.
> 
> thanks,
> alex
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