HEllo,
Thank you Robert and Ralph for your quick answers.
Le 2024-03-27 à 14:39, Ralph Corderoy a écrit :
Hello Thomas,
kre has given a good answer and I'd do what he suggested, but...
This issue comes from the fact that I wanted to use the
unattended-upgrades package on Debian which uses mailx to send
reports. Since only nmh is detected as providing a compatible mailx
program, mailx redirects to /usr/bin/mh/mhmail.
Are you saying that Debian puts in the symlink from /usr/bin/mhmail to
/usr/bin/mh/mhmail when selecting nmh as one of the alternative packages
to provide a virtual package which unattended-upgrades depends upon?
Yes. To be extra clear, /usr/bin/mailx is a symlink to
/etc/alternatives/mailx which itself is a symlink to /usr/bin/mh/mhmail.
That sounds flawed for the reason you gave. Does Debian have a central
place to manipulate PATH to append /usr/bin/mh for unattended-upgrades?
unattended-upgrade(8) is configured via
/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades. In this file it is noted
that to send email reports, mailx is used:
// Send email to this address for problems or packages upgrades
// If empty or unset then no email is sent, make sure that you
// have a working mail setup on your system. A package that provides
// 'mailx' must be installed. E.g. "u...@example.com"
Unattended-Upgrade::Mail "root";
I discovered the mailx issue while trying to use mailx with my user
account which does have /usr/bin/mh in its PATH.
apt-file(1) here suggests there's
a /lib/systemd/system/unattended-upgrades.service so perhaps a local
file to override its PATH?
For the reason given above I don't think this would solve it. I think
these results might be even more explicit:
$ echo $PATH
/usr/bin/mh:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/local/games:/usr/games:/snap/bin
$ cp /usr/bin/mh/mhmail ./test
$ ./test
./test: 1: /home/thomas/mhparam: not found
./test: 95: exec: /home/thomas/inc: not found
Which version of Debian is this? ‘lsb_release -a’ shows this.
$ uname -a; lsb_release -a
Linux nuage 6.1.0-18-amd64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Debian 6.1.76-1
(2024-02-01) x86_64 GNU/Linux
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Debian
Description:Debian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm)
Release:12
Codename: bookworm
Thank you for your help,
--
Thomas