Common problems with Ubuntu

[Shlomi Fish]

On Wednesday 12 May 2010 08:53:02 Baruch Even wrote:
> On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 7:43 PM, Shlomi Fish <shlomif at iglu.org.il> wrote:
> > On Tuesday 11 May 2010 16:04:29 Amos Shapira wrote:
> > > On 11 May 2010 22:01, geoffrey mendelson <geoffreymendelson at gmail.com>
> > 
> > wrote:
> > > > On May 11, 2010, at 2:52 PM, Dotan Cohen wrote:
> > > >> Ubuntu packages three Javas, but only the Sun Java has any worth.
> > > >> The other two only serve to mess up Sun Java installs. Stay away
> > > >> from them.
> > > > 
> > > > Ouch, that brings back another UBUNTU problem. It does not install
> > > > Java (are most programs) in /usr/bin. It installs them in /usr/bin
> > > > under another name, or eleswhere. Then it links
> > > > /etc/alternatives/<name> to them. Then it links /usr/bin/<name> to
> > > > /etc/alternatives/<name>.
> > > 
> > > That's actually part of the inheritance from Debian. Debian tends to
> > > have a long history behind most of their decisions so this system
> > > makes sense there. I'm not sure how different is Ubuntu from it
> > > though.
> > 
> > Last time I checked (Debian 3.1 or so), Debian did not take the
> > /etc/alternatives system to its natural conclusion though. I noticed that
> > when
> > I wanted to install postfix on what was then eskimo.iglu.org.il, I had to
> > uninstall qmail (which I wanted to get rid of eventually), because the
> > /usr/sbin/sendmail file conflicted between the two packages. Later on,
> > when I
> > worked on Fedora, I was able to install Postfix as well as sendmail (the
> > Fedora default) because I could play with the symlinks in
> > /etc/alternatives and other places. It's possible it was fixed in Debian
> > since then.
> 
> qmail was not packaged in Debian since it was non-free, not sure about its
> status nowadays. If you install something yourself or from an unofficial
> package you can not blame Debian for its failures.
> 

First of all, I should note that qmail was installed using the official 
installation procedure for Debian (there wasn't a publicly available binary 
package because qmail's author forbade distributing binary packages in the 
source code's distribution terms). Much more recently, the qmail source was 
made public domain (which Debian should not have a problem with, since they 
packaged my Freecell Solver, which also used to be public domain, although 
possibly under more explicit terms of what I mean by "Public Domain" than 
qmail's), but in the meanwhile qmail has accumulated many known bugs, and 
didn't keep up with recent changes in the E-mail landscape. There's also 
netqmail naturally, but it is not supported by the qmail author. 
http://qmail.org/netqmail/ - this seems out-of-date.

Anyway, I believe that the problem in Debian would have been exhibited even if 
I wanted to install exim in addition to postfix, or sendmail in addition to 
postfix etc. because they all supplied a /usr/sbin/sendmail file which was not 
a symlink.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

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