Hi,
TL;DR: Does exim4-config really need to conflict with other MTA's? I
would like to install a lightweight one alongside exim4, to get
a setuid-less sendmail that talks to exim4 via STMP.
For some background: I'm currently running exim4 as the main MTA on a
webserver. Due to a security measure configured by default in the Apache
mtm-itk module, my PHP scripts cannot use setuid binaries, which means
that sending mail from PHP fails with something like:
unable to set gid=1001 or uid=0 (euid=0): forcing real = effective
See https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=797653 for
details.
As a possible solution, I tried to install nullmailer, with the
intention for PHP to call nullmailer, which would be configured to drop
the mail to exim4 via SMTP.
However, installing nullmailer fails because exim4-config conflicts with
it. Looking more closely, it seems exim4-config actually intentionally
conflicts with all other MTAs.
Looking in the changelog, I found this entry (from 4.30-1 in 2003):
* exim4-config now conflicts with non-exim4 packages providing MTA, to keep
dselect from automatically installing it (and -base) on dist-upgrades on
systems that use a different MTA. (mh)
If this is really the reason, is there not (by now?) a better way to fix
this issue? Sounds a bit like a workaround, unless there are also other
reasons why having multiple MTAs alongside eachother is impossible.
At first glance, it actually seems like having multiple MTAs alongside
should not be impossible. There will be conflicts, but the ones I can
see can be solved (sendmail binary via alternatives, TCP ports by
configuring different ports or listenin on different IP addresses).
Is this something that can (or has been?) considered?
Gr.
Matthijs