[Pkg-mailman-hackers] Bug#419563: upgrade problem

[Ola Lundqvist]

Package: mailman
Severity: important
Version: 2.1.9-7

I had some serious problem to upgrade mailman yesterday. I do not
fully know the reason for the upgrade failure but this is what happend.
The upgrade path was sarge to etch.

I did a upgrade of mailman among other packages. It requires quite
a few to be upgraded and I think I did an dist-upgrade, but it was
yesterday so I may remember wrong.

During the upgrade I noted that python could not upgrade because
python-minimal had problem.

python-minimal could not upgrade because it tries to stop all
services that use python. Mailman was one of them.

But mailman could not be stopped, because it could not find
a python interpreter. I do not know how that happend but
obviously it did.

Now I was stuck. I could not upgrade python because it had problem
with mailman and I could not upgrade mailman because it had no
python.

The solution was to insert a "exit" line at the top of mailman
as a dirty hack.

Now it was possible to upgrade, so I removed that exit line
and was happy.

What I would like you to do is to check for the existance of
python in /etc/init.d/mailman and if no such interpreter can be found,
exit from the init.d script with a message perhaps, but without
any failure as the upgrade will break in that case.

Regards,

// Ola

-- 
 --- Ola Lundqvist systemkonsult --- M Sc in IT Engineering ----
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