Bug#481660: exim4-base: Exim refuses to start due to empty arguments

[Martin Geisler]

Package: exim4-base
Version: 4.69-2+b1
Severity: important
File: /etc/init.d/exim4

I did a 'dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config' to change my smarthost and was
give this message in return:

  Stopping MTA for restart:.
  Restarting MTA:exim: incompatible command-line options or arguments
  invoke-rc.d: initscript exim4, action "restart" failed.

Running 'EX4DEBUG=1 invoke-rc.d exim4 start' reveals that Exim is
started with:

  /sbin/start-stop-daemon --start --nicelevel 0 --quiet --exec
  /usr/sbin/exim4 --oknodo --pidfile /var/run/exim4/exim.pid -- -bd
  -q30m '' '' ''

where the final three empty arguments cause the trouble. If I run the
command without them Exim starts.

They come from three empty variables used in /etc/init.d/exim4:

  start_daemon -p "$PIDFILE" \
    "$DAEMON" -bd "-q${QFLAGS}${QUEUEINTERVAL}" \
    "${COMMONOPTIONS}" "${QUEUERUNNEROPTIONS}" "${SMTPLISTENEROPTIONS}"

Since I don't think I have done anything special to make the variables
empty, I am afraid this problem might affect many users.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (900, 'testing'), (800, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.24-1-686 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US, LC_CTYPE=en_US (charmap=ISO-8859-1)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages exim4-base depends on:
ii  adduser                       3.107      add and remove users and groups
ii  cron                          3.0pl1-104 management of regular background p
ii  debconf [debconf-2.0]         1.5.21     Debian configuration management sy
ii  exim4-config [exim4-config-2] 4.69-2     configuration for the Exim MTA (v4
ii  libc6                         2.7-10     GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libdb4.6                      4.6.21-6   Berkeley v4.6 Database Libraries [
ii  lsb-base                      3.2-11     Linux Standard Base 3.2 init scrip
ii  netbase                       4.32       Basic TCP/IP networking system

Versions of packages exim4-base recommends:
ii  bsd-mailx [mailx]  8.1.2-0.20071201cvs-3 A simple mail user agent
ii  mailx              1:20071201-3          Transitional package for mailx ren
ii  psmisc             22.6-1                Utilities that use the proc filesy

-- debconf information:
  exim4/purge_spool: false
  exim4-base/drec:
  exim4/move_exim3_spool: false

-- 
Martin Geisler

VIFF (Virtual Ideal Functionality Framework) brings easy and efficient
SMPC (Secure Multi-Party Computation) to Python. See: http://viff.dk/.
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