24.04 courier-imap package issue / hole in ubuntu-bug reporting strategies?

[Andrew Athan]

First two paragraphs are about a possible hole in the ubuntu bug reporting
strategies.
The problem that led me to discover this hole starts at paragraph 3, and
amounts to possibly erroneously dropped courier-mta associated packages.

TL;DR

Please go easy on me, I'm feeling completely demoralized by my experience
trying to make even the slightest progress to reach the right person
relative to problems with the courier-mta packages under Ubuntu 24.04

If this is the right forum, I would be happy to discuss what I think may be
a really unfortunate set of roadblocks that are up relative to being able
to reach Canonical to report/discuss distro package issues. The multitude
of forums, subforums, launchpad, discourse, bug tracker, etc ends up being
a wall of uncertainty; and then, to add insult to injury: Option 10 in
ubuntu-bug is effectively a noop and every option including 10 requires you
to have a package installed to report a bug with a package. What if the bug
is that the package is missing in the firstplace? This may be an
intentionally successful way to block a river of spam from dummies like me,
but ... all joking aside, this may be a real hole in the ubuntu
bug-reporting strategy.

First, I've tried emailing the package maintainer (Matthias Klose) as far
back as Oct 13, but no response. The issue is that courier-imap and
courier-webadmin packages were dropped from Ubuntu 24.04 while the rest of
the courier packages were not dropped. The purported reason for this is
that courier is not ported to PCRE3, but the maintainer of this venerable
(and I suspect still fairly widely used) email server suite claims
otherwise.

As a result of these missing packages, a do-release-upgrade will bork email
services relying on courier. I'd like to help resolve whatever issue is
causing the packages to not be included in 24.04, and am willing to put in
some work to bridge whatever gap exists there if there is a resource
constraint preventing the inclusion.

Your advice is appreciated! Below my signature is text from two emails
related to the courier-imap issue. As you can see from the second email,
there is a really unfortunate level of complexity introduced by the dropped
packages when users have to resort to building courier from source. Based
on Sam's comments about PCRE3 being supported since a long time ago,
I think maybe the reason the packages were dropped can be quickly resolved
so that they can once again be included.

Meanwhile, maybe someone can help me get Matthias' attention? Perhaps my
email to him went to spam.

Thank,
Andrew

=== email 1 ===
Matthias:

I have been in touch with the maintainer of the courier mail system via the
courier-users mailing list. Therein, I provided the below recipe for
overcoming the issue that arises for anyone with courier installed, when
doing a do-release-upgrade to 24.04, which will bork their courier install
because those packages are not available (and IMAP is very important).

Looking into the reason for your deletion, it appears linked to a
dependence on PCRE3, but Sam (the maintainer) states that he ported courier
to libpcre2 "long ago."

Therefore, there seems to be some disconnect. I've provided Sam (
mrsam at courier-mta.com) with your email address, and he may reach out.

A.

The recipe:
wget
http://launchpadlibrarian.net/708904399/courier-imap_5.0.13+1.0.16-3.2build1_amd64.deb
dpkg --ignore-depends=courier-base -i
courier-imap_5.0.13+1.0.16-3.2build1_amd64.deb
wget
http://launchpadlibrarian.net/708904405/courier-webadmin_1.0.16-3.2build1_amd64.deb
dpkg --ignore-depends=courier-base -i
courier-webadmin_1.0.16-3.2build1_amd64.deb


=== email 2 ===
Sam:

Thanks for your response. I actually meant for the prior email to go to the
mailing list, but let's complete the conversation here and if necessary one
of us can summarize to the list.

I feel like maybe there's something list in translation between us :)

(1) I provided a solution, involving a simple manual .deb download of an
"officially" built Ubuntu package, that can get users up and running on
24.04 with none of the complexities you mention just now. I suppose there
is a small risk that the imap and webmail packages may contain a regression
vs being used with the "newer" other courier packages that DID make it
through the do-release-upgrade.

If that did not come through clearly in my original email, I think it's
worth clarifying to the list, because my "solution" lets someone
immediately recover from an upgrade to 24.04 that has borked their
courier install,
with very little fuss.

(2) I am not suggesting that you need to become an Ubuntu maintainer. I
think perhaps you did not open the links in my original email:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1000053 and
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/noble/amd64/courier-imap

These seem to indicate that Matthias Klose, who maintains those packages,
deleted them from Ubuntu 24.04 because he believes they rely on PCRE3.
Therefore, since you state that you ported to pcre2 already, there must be
some disconnect.

I will email him to notify him of your statement and our conversation, but
perhaps contact from you will help resolve the problem. Maybe there's
something about the build process that he's getting wrong.

I don't have time myself to dig into INSTALL and speculate about what that
problem (where he is pulling in a deprecated library) might be. FYI, these
are the emails listed for him on Ubuntu's launchpad site. You need to
register to see them.

 doko at ubuntu.com
 doko at debian.org
 matthias.klose at canonical.com
 matthias.klose at ubuntu.com

On Sat, Oct 12, 2024 at 4:10 PM Sam Varshavchik <mrsam at courier-mta.com>
wrote:

> Andrew Athan writes:
>
> > « HTML content follows
> >
> >
> > »Sam:
> >
> >
> > >> Any comments on this situation?
> > > [debs can be built from source, see INSTALL]
> > > All packages must be built this way,
> > > even those that still have  older versions in Ubuntu or Debian.
> >
> >
> > I'm not sure what you mean in your last sentence.
>
> You cannot build a courier-imap deb directly from the source tarball and
> install it with the official debian or ubuntu courier-unicode and courier-
> authlib package already installed. All Debian/Ubuntu packages must be
> uninstalled first. Then, courier-unicode deb gets built from source and
> installed, then the courier-authlib deb gets built from source, and
> installed, and then courier, or courier-imap or sqwemail or maildrop.
>
> > To clarify the solution in my previous email: It's just meant to allow
> people
> > to immediately resolve problems post upgrade to 24.04, without having to
> > build from source.
>
> Upgrading to a new release requires quite a bit of work. The simplest way
> is
> to install a clean new release on a separate system, then build all deb
> packages on it, then copy them over to a local apt repository that apt is
> configured to pull from.
>
> With a bit more work you can use pbuilder-dist, instead of a separate
> system. Earlier this year I used pbuilder-dist on jammy to build noble
> Courier packages, and then drop them into a local aptly repository, and
> then
> had do-release-upgrade yank them in together with everything else. There's
> a
> pointer to my pbuilder-dist scripts in courier-unicode's INSTALL.
>
> That, admittedly, is not something that Joe Q. User is expected to handle,
> unfortunately I can't think of a simpler way to survive a release upgrade.
> I
> think that's really on apt's shoulders to make it easy to do a full
> release
> upgrade on a system that uses custom packages.
>
> I think that, the most practical approach for most users will do is
> uninstall everything, upgrade, then built and reinstall everything on the
> new release, making sure to save and restore all the configuration files.
>
> > The "situation" I was wondering if you have any comment on, is the issue
> of
> > the PCRE version dependency that is (so far) keeping the Ubuntu package
> > managers from including courier-[imap,webadmin] from being included in
> 24.04
>
> Courier was updated to use pcre2 some time ago, and the current packages
> are
> built against libpcre2. They build just fine on Ubuntu 24.
>
> > E.g. the community may care to know if you are planning to resolve that
> > issue, or have strong feelings about it.
>
> Unfortunately I can't spare the cycles to go through the motions of
> becoming
> an official Debian or Ubuntu maintainer.  But that's not really needed, I
> think that anyone should be able to handle building deb packages from the
> source tarballs.
>
>
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