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[bug#59701] [PATCH] gnu: mailutils: Inform correct path of sendmail.
From: |
EuAndreh |
Subject: |
[bug#59701] [PATCH] gnu: mailutils: Inform correct path of sendmail. |
Date: |
Thu, 1 Dec 2022 10:15:55 +0000 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:102.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/102.5.0 |
Come to think of it, I did try it. It required a significant amount of
patches to the source code itself, to the point where one should prepare
a patchset and send upstream, after refactoring some of the code.
The problem is that the aforementioned search path used is searched at
compile-time, and if no sendmail binary is found, the absolute fallback
path is used instead. So instead of a run-time $PATH lookup, it has a
compile-time /usr/sbin:/usr/lib:/etc lookup, with a /usr/sbin/sendmail
fallback.
Ideally we would like to have:
1. not looking for sendmail binaries at compile-time, and relying on
$PATH instead;
2. not having a fallback absolute path to a fallback binary, and just
get a ENOENT at runtime instead, plus a few more diagnostic messages to
STDERR.
As I progressed in achieving that, I had modification on top of
modification to the build system and the source code, and at some point
I found myself questioning the approach, as it was becoming too fragile
and too custom.
There is no bug registered in GNU Mailutils' bug database, but there is
a thread [0] in its list with people talking about when the exact same
problem was encountered when our friends at Nix packaged mailutils [1].
The suggestion [2] from the maintainer is actually to put a symlink to
the setuid sendmail binary where mailutils expects to find it:
> There's no way to do this currently, except for symlinking the actual
> sendmail-compatible binary (whatever it is in your distro) to the
> predefined path (preferably, to the place defined by _PATH_SENDMAIL
> in your /usr/include/paths.h). In fact, that's what all distros that
> I've ever seen do.
The difference for Guix (and Nix) is that /usr/sbin/ doesn't even exist,
so we use the PATH_SENDMAIL macro to tell mailutils where to find
sendmail, as upstream seems happy with the state of affairs.
[0]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-mailutils/2017-10/msg00004.html
[1]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/21008
[2]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-mailutils/2017-10/msg00001.html