Bug 172838 - spost fails to send mail in pre-built package
Summary: spost fails to send mail in pre-built package
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED ERRATA
Alias: None
Product: Fedora
Classification: Fedora
Component: nmh
Version: 4
Hardware: i386
OS: Linux
medium
medium
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Josh Bressers
QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2005-11-10 13:25 UTC by Joel Uckelman
Modified: 2007-11-30 22:11 UTC (History)
1 user (show)

Fixed In Version:
Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2005-11-10 21:25:06 UTC
Type: ---
Embargoed:


Attachments (Terms of Use)

Description Joel Uckelman 2005-11-10 13:25:05 UTC
From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050920 Firefox/1.0.7

Description of problem:
When I install the pre-built package and try to send a message, I get the following error at the 'what now' prompt:


[uckelman@charybdis ~]$ comp

What now? s
spost: can't exec no: No such file or directory
send: message not delivered to anyone

What now?


However, when I build the package myself from the source RPM---without changing anything in the spec file---sending messages works as expected. Building the SRPM in two different places on the same architecture ought to produce the same result. The same thing happens on my other FC4 box, and this same problem has existed with every version of nmh that's been in extras to date.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
nmh-1.1-10.fc4

How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Install the prebuilt package.
2. Try to send a message.
  

Actual Results:  I got the error message seen above.

Expected Results:  The message should be sent.

Additional info:

Comment 1 Josh Bressers 2005-11-10 13:30:56 UTC
Can you please provide the output of:
rpm -q --requires nmh

for your rebuilt packages.  This sounds like a missing dependency issue.

Comment 2 Joel Uckelman 2005-11-10 13:33:47 UTC
(Wow, that was fast.)

[uckelman@charybdis i386]$ rpm -q --requires nmh
/bin/sh  
config(nmh) = 1.1-10.fc4
libc.so.6  
libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.0)  
libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.1)  
libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.3)  
libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.3.4)  
libgdbm.so.2  
libtermcap.so.2  
rpmlib(CompressedFileNames) <= 3.0.4-1
rpmlib(PartialHardlinkSets) <= 4.0.4-1
rpmlib(PayloadFilesHavePrefix) <= 4.0-1


Comment 3 Josh Bressers 2005-11-10 21:25:06 UTC
The problem here is that nmh's configure script is broken and does something
silly if sendmail isn't installed during the build.  I'll fix the problem
upstream, and added sendmail as a buildrequires for the Fedora Extras packages.
 It's a hackish solution, but will work.  This should be fixed properly when
nmh-1.2 is released.

New packages have been submitted to the build system, sometime in the near
future nmh-1.1-11.fc4 should show up.  Please reopen this bug if the problem
persists.

Comment 4 Joel Uckelman 2005-11-10 21:37:41 UTC
Hold on, that doesn't make sense to me. I *don't* have sendmail installed on my
machine, and the local build works correctly---from which I would conclude that
sendmail is *not* required in order to have a working build. But it appears that
you've concluded the opposite.

Have I misunderstood the proposed solution?


Comment 5 Josh Bressers 2005-11-11 00:56:38 UTC
While you may not have sendmail installed, when configure is run it looks for
something called sendmail.  You should have something installed on your system
called sendmail (check /usr/sbin/sendmail).  Here is the macro in question:

dnl Look for `sendmail'
pathtmp=/usr/lib:/usr/sbin:/usr/etc:/usr/ucblib:/usr/bin:/bin
AC_PATH_PROG(sendmailpath, sendmail, no, [$pathtmp])

What happens is if configure can't find a program called sendmail somewhere on
the system, it defaults to using "no", which doesn't exist.  The upstream fix
changes "no" to /usr/sbin/sendmail, which will be used as default and should
exist on most systems (postfix for example has an executable which pretends to
be sendmail).

Comment 6 Joel Uckelman 2005-11-11 13:26:55 UTC
Aha! Thanks so much for the explanation. Now I get why the error was so
incomprehensible.



Comment 7 Joel Uckelman 2005-11-20 18:51:21 UTC
A further suggestion: The new package now has 

 BuildRequires: sendmail

but it isn't really sendmail that's required. Any MTA which provides sendmail
emulation via /usr/sbin/senmail would do. So why not make it

 BuildRequires: /usr/sbin/sendmail

instead?


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