multiple failures of sympa's postinst script

[Hadmut Danisch]

Hi,

I just tried to automatically install sympa through automatic installation (puppet) and found the postinst to terribly fail for two reasons:

- the first problem is that the postinst script insists on connecting to and configuring a database.

This is bad, since it could be necessary to configure the database after sympa has been installed by automatically editing /etc/sympa/sympa.conf . The database might not yet be available at the time of package installation.

- the second problem is that the postinst script installs and enables a sympa.conf in /etc/apache2/conf-available and conf-enabled.

This is bad because it can break server installations (e.g. if the machine hosts several virtual machines), and opens a web interfaces even if the admin doesn't want to. Some people prefer to use it the old fashioned way without a web page.

regards
Hadmut

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 14.04
Package: sympa 6.1.17~dfsg-1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.13.0-19.40-generic 3.13.6
Uname: Linux 3.13.0-19-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.13.3-0ubuntu1
Architecture: amd64
Date: Tue Apr 1 00:52:35 2014
ProcEnviron:
 TERM=xterm
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=<set>
 LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
 SHELL=/usr/bin/tcsh
SourcePackage: sympa
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Hadmut Danisch (hadmut)]

The postinst is *really* broken:

When I select to not use dbconfig and to configure the database later, installation fails because postinst tries to access the database even if it does not exist yet.