Bug#481597: dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config does not recognize changed hostname

Andrew Vaughan ajv-lists at netspace.net.au
Thu Jun 12 18:23:50 UTC 2008


On Thursday 12 June 2008 21:00, Marc Haber wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 04, 2008 at 04:27:34PM +1000, Andrew Vaughan wrote:
...
> > I wasn't even aware that the local machine should be listed in
> > /etc/hosts.
>
> It should. A lot of daemons rely on the local host name being
> resolveable before the network is brought up.
>
> > I note that if I remove that line, dpkg-reconfigure exim-config will
> > happily complete, but that question 5 shows that exim-config doesn't
> > know what the local hostname is.  (Something complains "hostname:
> > Unknown host", but exim-config doesn't seem to actually care about the
> > error.)
>
> Oh, interesting. Thanks for spotting this, fixed in svn (it is
> actually only an error message that is not sent to /dev/null before
> properly handling that case).
>
I don't mind the error message.  Afaict it only appears if the local 
hostname is not resolvable.  (And you have suggested that that should be 
considered a configuration error).  

What concerns me is that exim4-config attempts to get the fqdn, but accepts 
an empty string and then happily continues as though nothing is wrong.  

If the "fix" consists of simply swallowing the error message, then you've 
missed my point.  (It's also possible that I'm missing the case where a 
fqdn equal to an empty string represents a valid and useful configuration, 
and is not an error).  

> > I guess that the FQDN at startup can legitimately be different from the
> > FQDN at debconf question 3, otherwise you wouldn't be asking question
> > 3.
>
> The debconf questions do not have numbers (and it depends on your
> answers to previous questions wether they are asked or not, so the
> numbers are in fact meaningless). Which question wording do
> you mean?
>
	The "mail name" is the domain name used to "qualify" mail addresses 
	without a domain name.   
        This name will also be used by other programs. It should be the
	single, full domain name (FQDN).                                       
	For example, if a mail address on the local host is 
	foo at domain.example, then the correct value for this option would 
	be domain.example....


Thanks for your work in Debian.

Andrew





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