Fixing Zimbra's Broken debs
As much as I love Zimbra, I find their Debian
packaging frustrating. Why do they insist on shipping half broken debs?
I can excuse vmware for being too lazy to provide proper descriptions
for their packages, although the generic “Best email money can buy” text
seems a little lame. Failing to populate the “Provides” field is brain
dead. This makes it possible to install mailx
on a server running Zimbra
without installing another MTA.
I’ve created a simple workaround deb which provides mail-transport-agent
and depends on zimbra-mta
. The deb also symlinks the zimbra sendmail
binary to /usr/sbin/sendmail
- where it belongs. Now mailx
and other
tools which depend on mail-transport-agent
can be installed. The package
should work with both Debian and Ubuntu.
The source available on
github, or you can
download a prebuilt platform independent deb from github’s download
manager (no longer available).
The package is released under the terms of the
WTFPLv2.
I hope that Zimbra builds better debs and makes this package obsolete.