Package: smartmontools Version: 6.6-1 Severity: normal Dear maintainers,
smartmontools relies on mail(1) to send its warning emails, and indeed Recommends: mailx | mailutils. This however does take into account that there are systems which are perfectly able to send mail using the sendmail MTA, but where mail(1) is not available. smartmontools is currently not able to send mail from these setups, and just installing a mailx-compatible MUA is sometimes not enough without extra configuration steps. This situation is not ideal. This issue has been first brought up in Ubuntu: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/smartmontools/+bug/1833331 where Christian Franke (smartmontools upstream developer) notes that the email sending process is handled by the 10mail script, which is part of the Debian packaging. He suggests to modify the script so it fallbacks to sendmail if mail(1) isn't available, e.g. like this: === 10mail #!/bin/bash mail=/usr/bin/mail sendmail=/usr/sbin/sendmail if [ -x $mail ]; then echo "$SMARTD_FULLMESSAGE" | $mail -s "$SMARTD_SUBJECT" $SMARTD_ADDRESS elif [ -x $sendmail ]; then $sendmail $SMARTD_ADDRESS <<EOF Subject: $SMARTD_SUBJECT To: ${SMARTD_ADDRESS// /, } $SMARTD_FULLMESSAGE EOF else echo "Found neither $mail nor $sendmail" exit 1 fi === end I think this change should land in the Debian package. Once sendmail is supported mail-transport-agent could be added to Recommends. Paride
