• A little help needed with postfix packaging (debconf)

    From Michael Tokarev@21:1/5 to All on Wed Feb 5 11:30:01 2025
    Hi!

    I'd love to have little help with postfix before trixie.

    There are 2 open issues which needs fixing, both involving debconf,
    and I haven't dealt with debconf before (despite being a long-term
    DD), and my time these days is scarce, - so it would be difficult
    for me to complete the task before trixie. So if someone can help
    here, please do.

    Postfix debconf .config script is written in perl.

    The two issues are.

    1. the debconf stuff uses the remembered debconf values, not the
    actual values user has in the main.cf. This leads to confusion
    at least. https://bugs.debian.org/734401 is the bug in question,
    an old one. Instead of using what's recorded in debconf, the
    config script should pick actual values from the postfix main.cf,
    if that one exists.

    2. there should be one more debconf question, about the chroot,
    which is a very old issue with postfix on debian. We now have
    a trivial way to turn chroot on/off, so it's now possible to add
    a debconf question about this.

    This question should be independent on the first question in the
    existing debconf template - whenever the use wants to configure
    postfix using debconf or not, - even with no configuration to
    main.cf, chroot question should still be asked.

    The difficulty here is that the answer is not a boolean, because
    the knob is touching several independent entries in the master.cf
    file. So in the existing configuration, some entries can be
    chrooted, while some others - not, and besides yes/no, we're getting
    3rd choice: keep as-is. I don't know how to express this in
    debconf terms, - sometimes it will be a boolean, and sometimes it's
    "keep", and it's unclear how to choice initial value for this one
    based on the existing config.

    Maybe whole debconf stuff needs to be rewritten now, - I don't know
    yet. The current perl-based one is quite messy, especially the
    navigation thing (which has a few bugs in it already, like "Back"
    or "Cancel" not working as expected in a few places). Also, some
    questions don't make much sense anymore, - for example, mynetworks
    question can probably be skipped entirely in favor of mynetworks_style,
    or maybe recipient_delimiter can be removed too as non-important
    (a lot of this stuff is easier to configure by editing main.cf
    directly, as we don't have full main.cf configurator anyway).

    So, if someone can share some resources to make postfix package better
    in trixie, please do.

    Thanks,

    /mjt

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