Bug#527445: Fails at configuration ("delimiter character is not a single-byte character")

[Andreas Metzler]

On 2009-05-07 David <david.maillists at gmail.com> wrote:
> Package: exim4-config
> Version: 4.69-10
> Severity: serious

> Some of the output of apt-get -f install:

> Setting up exim4-config (4.69-10) ...
> sed: -e expression #1, char 2: delimiter character is not a single-byte
> character
> dpkg: error processing exim4-config (--configure):
>  subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1

> Because of that, packages exim4-base, exim4-daemon-light and exim4 are left
> unconfigured as well.
[...]

This is caused/triggered by the upgrade of sed to version 4.2.

If you take a 8Bit latin1 character, e.g ä and use it as pattern
delimiter in sed, e.g. like this: sed -e 'sä123ä42äg' stuff suddenly
stops working in special circumstances with sed 4.2. Sed now only
accepts this if you are running a single byte encoding in LC_CTYPE
(LC_CTYPE=C is fine), otherwise it probably is trying to interpret it
as a (invalid) multibyte sequence and tthrows an error.

Would you mind testing whether adding
export LC_ALL=C
somewhere at the start of /usr/sbin/update-exim4.conf fixes the bug for
you?

cu andreas
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