mail-stack-delivery has missing packages on focal

[doweller]

On Xenial and Bionic the list of packages and the setup as a whole differs greatly from Focal. Focal has dovecot only - Xenial and Bionic (and earlier versions of Ubuntu) have:

    dovecot-core
    dovecot-imapd
    dovecot-managesieved
    dovecot-pop3d
    postfix

Therefore installing mail-stack-delivery on Focal does not result in a working Mailserver setup, which is the expected behaviour (taking into account what previous versions did)

[Hans Joachim Desserud (hjd)]

Thanks for reporting.

I couldn't find a bug report number or more details on it from searching the changelog, it looks like mail-stack-delivery was dropped in dovecot 1:2.2.35-2ubuntu1. Search for either for more details on http://changelogs.ubuntu.com/changelogs/pool/main/d/dovecot/dovecot_2.3.7.2-1ubuntu3/changelog

[Paride Legovini (paride)]

Hello,

mail-stack-delivery is a transitional package depending on dovecot-core; it still exists in Focal. Focal still has all of:

    dovecot-core
    dovecot-imapd
    dovecot-managesieved
    dovecot-pop3d
    postfix

so I'm not sure I understand where the problem is. If I remember correctly Dovecot has its own repository for Debian/Ubuntu packages, and that *may* ship Dovecot in a single package. Can you please make sure you are not using third-party repositories?

I'm setting the status of this bug to Incomplete for the moment; please change it back to New after replying and we'll look at it again. Thanks!

[Paul Benzschawel (pbenzschawel)]

When I tried to install mail-stack-delivery in Focal it does not install/configure postfix like it had in 18.04. So like Doweller reported, you do not get a working mail-server when installing mail-stack-delivery in Focal.

I manually downloaded mail-stack-delivery2.2.33.2.deb and ran sudo apt install and it installed/configured postfix and all the dependencies as expected. Hopefully that makes sense!

[Paride Legovini (paride)]

Yeah it does, I misinterpreted this bug report, sorry for the confusion.

Thing is, like Hans Joachim Desserud wrote already, the mail-stack-delivery metapackage is now empty and to be considered deprecated. The rationale is in the package changelog for version 1:2.2.35-2ubuntu1. The interesting bits are:

* Dropped Changes (mail-stack-delivery)
  It was decided to no more carry mail-stack-delivery as a package in favor
  to out-of-package solutions. It became less useful due to one of the
  biggest benefit (auto-ssl setup) being part of the base setup now.

The reason why the package still depends on dovecot-core is:

- d/mail-stack-delivery.postinst: Use ssl key/cert paths now set up by
  dovecot-core; transition for such configs formerly set up by
  mail-stack-delivery to use the new default ssl config (if user had no
  conffile change or choses new defaults).

I think the bottom line here is: do not use mail-stack-delivery. I agree this change was not not easy to spot, and the fact that it happened back in Cosmic didn't help.

[Andreas Hasenack (ahasenack)]

I think this bug is wontfix, or opinion, but we need tasks for the Focal release notes, and the server guide. I'm failing at that, can't figure out the UI to do it.

[Andreas Hasenack (ahasenack)]

This was the deprecation notice sent back then:

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-server/2018-March/007682.html

some replies came back in May:
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-server/2018-May/007707.html

[Andreas Hasenack (ahasenack)]

The server guide has a warning about this package being deprecated (paride just added it):

https://ubuntu.com/server/docs/mail-postfix
"""
Deprecation warning: please note that the mail-stack-delivery metapackage has been deprecated in Focal. The package still exists for compatibility reasons, but won’t setup a working email system.
"""

A search doesn't turn mail-stack-delivery up anywhere else, so I'm marking that task as released.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Groovy has returned to sync for dovecot, meaning the mail-stack-delivery transition package is no longer present going forward.