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.