Bug#392831: exim4-config: colons or semi colons as separators (debconf templates issue)

[Marc Haber]

tags #392831 confirmed
thanks

On Fri, Oct 13, 2006 at 09:34:50PM +0200, Alexandre Fayolle wrote:
> Severity: grave
> Justification: renders package unusable

I don't think the package gets entirely unuseable, but I'll leave the
severits as-is.

> I'm having to reinstall my mail server (HD died on the previous one),
> and the debconf questions in exim4-config caused me to fill in wrong
> values, which broke the mail server.

No, you didn't fill in wrong values, the post-processing of the values
went wrong.

>  * "Other destinations for which mail is accepted" says in the help:
> "Please enter a semicolon-separated list of recipient domains"
> 
> This does not work:

It is nevertheless correct; it's program code that is wrong.

> An easy patch is to change the wording of the debconf template and the
> translations.

Unacceptable for inconsistence.

>  But it is probably better to have both lists use the same separator.
>  If exim4 expects colons, the config script could sed s/;/:/ that line
>  before writing it in the update-exim4.conf.conf file. 

The actual fix will be a little harder, since older installs might
actually still use a colon-separated list. We need to detect whether
semicolons or colons were used as separator and generate the
appropriately correct replacement value.

Unfortuantely, dc_other_hostnames gets special handling in
update-exim4.conf, and that special handling goes badly wrong.

I'll fix that first thing tomorrow.

Greetings
Marc

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