Re: [gentoo-user] Heads up: Gentoo fouls up mail transport agent.

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Sun, Jul 22, 2018 at 6:57 AM Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> wrote:
>
> On Sat, Jul 21, 2018 at 18:10:58 -0400, Mike Gilbert wrote:
>
> Apologies to the maintainers and users of nullmailer.

Yeah, there is nothing wrong with nullmailer.  It is a minimalist MTA
for systems where you just want to relay mail to another host without
running a full MTA.

> > You must have installed a package that depends on virtual/mta,
> > presumably because it needs to send emails.
>
> The package was gnupg, which surely doesn't need to send email.
>

https://wiki.gnupg.org/WKS
https://bugs.gentoo.org/658164

(The latter ironically has yet another person not using
package.provided - this one should know better...  Plus, you really
don't want to have a system without any MTA - in your case you had
installed one outside of portage, but if you don't have any that is
what nullmailer is for.)

>
> Thanks, I didn't know about package.provided.  It's not quite ideal, but
> suffices as a workaround.  What's suboptimal about it is that you can
> only specify particular versions of packages, not the package as such.
> So, if I put
>
>     virtual/mta-1
>
> into my package.provided, I'm going to suffer again in the same way when
> somebody releases virtual/mta-2.  As a workaround, my p.p. looks like
> this:

So, two things:

First, it is probably better to put one of the qmail variants in your
package.provided and not virtual/mta-1.  I believe that will actually
block stuff that interferes with qmail instead of merely making it
less likely for an MTA to be pulled in.

Nobody should be depending on a specific version of virtual/mta unless
there is something wrong with the packages in the previous versions.
If there is something wrong with those packages, then there is
probably something wrong with your configuration which you would want
to know.  Since you've put qmail in your packages.provided you'll
actually get blockers instead of portage just walking over your stuff.

You should also be installing qmail in /usr/local so that you don't
have files getting overwritten by portage.  You'll still have the path
concerns but in general you shouldn't be writing to /usr without the
package manager.  You get to keep the pieces if it happily overwrites
your stuff from time to time otherwise.

-- 
Rich