Spamassassin FTBFS in focal

[Bryce Harrington]

The exim4 update in focal created a dependency breakage due to exim4-localscanapi-2.1 moving to exim4-localscanapi-3.1, which makes sa-exim non-installable. A simple rebuild of spamassassin 3.4.4~rc1-1 was insufficient to resolve this.

https://launchpad.net/~ci-train-ppa-service/+archive/ubuntu/3902/+packages

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

On first glance at the build log, it looks like the spamd daemon is not starting up

spam_pid not found: Sleeping 2 - Retry # 30
...
spamd start failed - Could not find a valid PID.

It's not immediately evident from the log output why it did not start up.

There are a number of warnings about missing prerequisites for tests. I'm not (yet) familiar enough with spamassassin's build to know if these are normal or not.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

In the CI PPA, spamassassin was failing to build on amd64:

  https://launchpad.net/~ci-train-ppa-service/+archive/ubuntu/3902/+packages

However, with a simple rebuild it seems now to be passing (it's in the publication step). Perhaps the issue was just a network related glitch, and lack of network prevented the service from starting?

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

From update-excuses.txt:

trying: exim4
skipped: exim4 (177, 181, 1)
    got: 95+0: a-20:a-18:a-18:i-2:p-19:s-18
    * ppc64el: sa-exim

It doesn't seem to be showing exim4 failing on other platforms though.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

apt shows sa-exim depends on exim4-localscanapi-2.1,
$ apt-cache depends sa-exim
sa-exim
  Depends: <exim4-localscanapi-2.1>
  Depends: spamc
  Depends: libc6
 |Depends: debconf
  Depends: <debconf-2.0>
    cdebconf
    debconf
  Depends: libnetaddr-ip-perl
  Recommends: perl
  Suggests: spamassassin

However its control file doesn't have a direct dependency on that package, it seems to be pulled in via exim:Depends:

Package: sa-exim
Architecture: any
Depends: ${exim:Depends}, spamc, ${shlibs:Depends}, ${misc:Depends},
 debconf (>= 1.2.0) | debconf-2.0, libnetaddr-ip-perl
...

exim4 Provides exim4-localscanapi-3.1 via its exim4-daemon-* binary packages

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

sa-exim generates its requirements via:

binary-arch: build
    ...
    echo "exim:Depends=exim4-localscanapi-`exim4-localscan-plugin-config --localscan-apiversion`" \
           >> debian/sa-exim.substvars
    dh_gencontrol

So, looks like rebuilding sa-exim should correct the mis-dependency.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Rebuilding sa-exim did indeed clear the blockage, and allowed exim4 to migrate successfully.