Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 52057
RFE: Support for non-sendmail MTAs on installs and upgrades
Last modified: 2007-03-26 23:48:07 EDT
Red Hat has shipped and supported alternate MTAs (postfix, exim) in the Power Tools of prior releases. Users upgrading from prior releases who have installed these better MTAs will be broken by the sendmail RPM in RC1, which gets installed even though it conflicts. I upgraded a RH 7.1 box which had postfix installed as the MTA. sendmail was installed by anaconda, even though the spec for postfix contains Provides: MTA smtpd smtpdaemon Conflicts: sendmail, exim so the sendmail RPM should never have been installed. When it installed, it overwrote /usr/sbin/sendmail leaving a subtly broken postfix install behind. This has to be fixed before release -- there are a *lot* of RH boxes out there with non-sendmail MTAs
This should be working ok, if the new rpms also have a "Obsoletes: sendmail" in them. If this does not work or if still something in the sendmail rpm is missing to get this working, please reopen this bug-report or open a new one. Thanks, Florian La Roche
I've not looked at the sendmail spec yet, but the postfix RPM which I had installed, and which RH's sendmail RPM in RC1 partially overwrote, has Obsoletes: sendmail, exim, qmail, smail in the spec file.
This is still true with the sendmail shipped in RH 7.2 release. To be blunt, this is majorly fucked
I re-assign this to the installation program anaconda, that should take care about update policies. Looks like the current settings in the sendmail spec file should be correct. Florian La Roche
I'm not certain, but I think you're confusing multiple different bugs here. There's bug #1: Red Hat only ships sendmail, and not better replacement MTAs such as postfix. That's a bug I've filed before, and argued about, and am willing to argue about further. That's not this bug, however. This bug is bug #2: The Red Hat upgrade ignores previously installed software which obsoletes software the installer plans on including. The specific example I used was postfix already installed, and sendmail overwriting it, but I think it's a more generic bug than that. It looks to me like any alternative software with an Obsoletes tag gets ignored by the installer and overwritten anyway, since the same thing happens for me with BIND overwriting djbdns.
For Hampton there is a strategy for handling this which does not involve anaconda changes.
What is the strategy? Or is it still top-secret? ;-)