Comment 12 for bug 2065546

Hi William,

The culprit for pulling in postfix when installing the set of packages you mentioned in the description is Emacs. This is a side effect of a change that I made when I last merged the last version from Debian, in an attempt to reduce the delta and make it possible to eventually sync Emacs again.

There are a few ways you can workaround this issue.

1) You can invoke apt using "--no-install-recommends" when installing Emacs. This will prevent apt from installing the packages that Emacs recommended, and mailutils (which actually installs postfix) is one of them.

2) As Lucas said above, you can define the DEBIAN_FRONTEND environment variable to "noninteractive". You can do it like:

DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt install ....

Note that the DEBIAN_FRONTEND variable was *not* set on Jammy either; the problem here relies solely on the fact that Emacs started recommending mailutils (like it does in Debian), instead of suggesting it.

I will add an Emacs task to the bug, but I consider this a wishlist and believe that it should be raised with Debian first. Could you open a bug against the Debian Emacs package and let us know when you do it, please?

Thank you.