Sympa installation fails because of missing sympa.conf-smime.in

[Thomas]

Binary package hint: sympa

For security reasons I disabled the root account on my machine. This works otherwise fine, but when I tried to install sympa, the following error occurs:

Richte sympa ein (5.3.4-2ubuntu2) ...
Adding system user: sympa.
Your account has expired; please contact your system administrator
chfn: PAM authentication failed
adduser: `/usr/bin/chfn -f Sympa mailing list manager sympa' returned error code 1. Exiting.
dpkg: Fehler beim Bearbeiten von sympa (--configure):
 Unterprozess post-installation script gab den Fehlerwert 1 zurück
Fehler traten auf beim Bearbeiten von:
 sympa
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

The user is still created, but the install script does not continue because of this problem.

[Thomas (me-thomaskeller)]

Ok, the described behaviour seems to be a bug which was otherwhere filed:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/hardy/+source/shadow/+bug/238755

Still, if I fix the "wrong" locking of my root user account with

$ sudo passwd --unlock root
$ sudo usermod --lock root

and try to reinstall sympa, I get a new / different error:

Setting up sympa (5.3.4-2ubuntu2) ...
chmod: cannot access `/etc/sympa/sympa.conf-smime.in': No such file or directory
dpkg: error processing sympa (--configure):
 subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
 sympa
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

[Thomas (me-thomaskeller)]

This is probably also related to http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=501605