Installing openSMTPD wants to remove sendmail

[drhowarddrfine]

My impression is that I can have both installed and running on my system at the same time. So I tried to install openSMTPD and the first thing it wants to do is remove sendmail.
I thought that doing pkg install -I opensmtpd would do what I want but it still wants to remove sendmail.

I'm looking into replacing sendmail but wanted to set up openSMTPD before making the switch. Looking around, it seems I should be able to do this. Am I wrong?

 

[T-Daemon]

pkg install -I opensmtpd

The pkg-install(8) -I option is not intended to do what you have in mind.

The problem in this particular case is that some of the mail/sendmail and mail/opensmtpd man pages are in conflict due to the same names [1]. There is no pkg-install(8) option to exclude parts of the package from installation.

However, it's possible to install the applications side by side by building one of the applications (I choose mail/sendmail) from port, excluding the conflicting man pages from build.

Those can be easily spotted when trying to install mail/opensmtpd. pkg-install(8) prints a conflict message with the man page in question.

I didn't look up how to correctly modify the Makefile and pkg-plist. Also, I couldn't find any user settable options that prevents the man pages from being built, so I just deleted the appropriate pieces of code.

In this specific case it's possible to install conflicting ports next to each other, as only man pages are affected, but not some executable files, for example.

[1]
aliases.5
sendmail.8
makemap.8
mail.local.8

 

[drhowarddrfine]

I didn't think it would be involved like that. I thought for sure there was a way to do this using pkg. I think you can set a package as "locked" so it can't be uninstalled but I have no experience with that.

 

[SirDice]

I think you can set a package as "locked" so it can't be uninstalled

It won't be updated, but it's not going to stop pkg(8) from complaining about conflicting files and will still refuse to install the 'conflicting' package.

You could switch to the sendmail(8) that's included with the base (it's still included with 14.x), unless you need some specific options mail/sendmail provides.

 

[drhowarddrfine]

I wanted to try opensmtpd on the same server I'm running sendmail. I have two IP addresses with my VSP but one is unused. Hence the issue.

 

[SirDice]

Run opensmtpd in a jail and nullfs(5) mount the appropriate directories?