The mlock program is missing in trixie. This is possibly related to the sudden depreciation of uw-imap.

However, mlock is a standalone program with no dependencies on uw-imap outside the build system.

mlock is used with the Alpine mail client as an optional dependency to provide mailbox locking.

Oddly enough, a copy of uw-imap (thus mlock) ship with Alpine source but are not compiled as part of the package.

Due to Debian package organization, mlock pseudo-package is tied to the uw-imap source tarball, not Alpine.

mlock is present in bookworm and unstable, but was uninstalled with no replacement during upgrade to trixie.

The below patch will allow mlock to compile independently of the uw-imap library (or Alpine).

Alternatively, please re-align this package to the Alpine source tarball.

Regards
Lloyd
--- mlock.c.orig	2025-07-10 18:56:53.245980338 -0000
+++ mlock.c	2025-07-10 18:56:14.313768725 -0000
@@ -40,6 +40,8 @@
 #include <netdb.h>
 #include <ctype.h>
 #include <string.h>
+#include <unistd.h>
+#include <time.h>

 #define LOCKTIMEOUT 5		/* lock timeout in minutes */
 #define LOCKPROTECTION 0664

--- Makefile.orig	2025-07-10 18:35:30.746998147 -0000
+++ Makefile	2025-07-10 19:09:13.030120243 -0000
@@ -24,14 +24,8 @@
 # Date:		8 February 1999
 # Last Edited:	30 August 2006

-
-C = ../c-client
-SHELL = /bin/sh
-
-# Get local definitions from c-client directory
-
-CC = `cat $C/CCTYPE`
-CFLAGS = `cat $C/CFLAGS`
+CC = gcc
+CFLAGS = -O2 -pipe -fno-omit-frame-pointer

 all:	mlock

@@ -39,13 +33,7 @@
 	$(CC) $(CFLAGS) -o mlock mlock.o

 install: mlock
-	chgrp mail mlock
-	chmod 3711 mlock
-	cp -p mlock /etc/mlock
+	install -m 3711 -g mail mlock /usr/bin/mlock

 clean:
 	rm -f *.o mlock || true
-
-# A monument to a hack of long ago and far away...
-love:
-	@echo 'not war?'

severity 1109072 normal
thanks

More than "missing", it was removed deliberately because the only
package using it was alpine, and now alpine includes and uses
/usr/bin/alpine-mlock instead.

Not anymore, alpine now uses /usr/bin/alpine-mlock. We did that
precisely to be able to drop the mlock package.

But mlock is compiled as part of the alpine package, under the name
alpine-mlock.

Do you miss mlock because you are still using it,
or only because you believed alpine still needed it?

If it's the second, I think this bug could be closed. If it's
the first, I think mlock as a standalone package is very unlikely
to come back, because no other package is using it.

I'm cc:ing Chris who reported this:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1091778

just in case he wants to add anything which I may have missed.

Thanks.

Hi Santiago,

Santiago Vila wrote:

I missed this due to the renaming of the binary, and thus assumed it wasn't included. It could be the alpine package I examined was the older (unpatched) version.

The latter.

Am I wrong for thinking there should have been an apt-listchanges NEWS bulletin about this?

FWIW I did due diligence before opening this bug, somehow I missed the new binary when running strings on alpine. Was the renaming to avert any package conflict?

The first I realized something was wrong when I saw mlock in the list of packages to be removed, with no replacement identified.

While I agree there is no bug, maybe there is a bug in the documentation? If two packages are being merged, the change should have been publicized better unless I'm overlooking something. I can't be the only one that will have this concern post-upgrade.

reassign 1109072 src:alpine
found 1109072 2.26+dfsg-3
thanks

It depends on where we put the threshold for such kind of things (see below).

I think that's what the changelog is for:

alpine (2.26+dfsg-3) unstable; urgency=medium

  [ Santiago Vila ]
  * Add debian/salsa-ci.yml.
  * Add patch to build with gettext 0.23.x.
  * Build with --max-parallel=1. Closes: #1089250.
  * Build and use alpine-mlock, drop dependency on mlock. Closes: #1091777.

  [ Unit 193 ]
  * Update Standards-Version to 4.7.2.

for no particular gain. The alpine program will work the same,
so this was the most simple way to implement the feature.

But I'm not the alpine maintainer, I just helped to deprecate mlock
(which is why this bug drew my attention), so I will leave the
alpine maintainers to handle this bug as they see it fits.

(I'm adding them to Cc and reassigning the bug).


BTW: sending a gpg-encrypted copy for a message which is also
sent to 1109072@bugs.debian.org and publically archived here:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1109072

is a little bit misleading. If you can and it's possible, please find
the way to tell protonmail not to send me encrypted emails related
with the Debian bug system.

Thanks.