From the personal Inbox of the exim4 maintainer
The DDs reading this might know the situation: You are subscribed to a gazillion of mailing lists, and spend quite some time answering questions of people using your packages. That's fine, service to your users. Occasionally, users take great pains in finding out a personal mail address (for example, by googling, and finding the webmasteridiot mail address on my personal web page) to ask their question in private e-mail. This prevents the answers from showing up in mail archives and deprives the public of a possibility to find a solution to this question themselves in the future.
Today, I had this happen to me twice. In the morning, I received a question about exim4 in private e-mail. In German. I investigated the user's problem (which looked interesting enough), found two minor issues in the Debian exim4 packages and upstream exim behaving not as expected. I fixed the two issues in the package and reported the unexpected behavior of exim to the upstream mailing list. I then reported this - in German - back to the person who asked the question. Time from incoming message to outgoing report was like 80 minutes, most of which I spent with this user's issue. On my personal time.
A short while afterwards, I found out that this person has waited a mere eleven minutes before asking the same question on pkg-exim4-users, this time in English. Had I known before, I would have drafted my answer in English as well, to have the answer publicly visible. By doing this double post, the user has deprived the public of my answer.
I'm probably going to stop answering questions asked in private mail. I might draft a boilerplate answer along the lines of "I don't answer questions asked in private mail unless I am being paid to do so. You might be better off by asking one of the numerous mailing lists that are available on the Internet. I read a lot of them, might see your question, and you might get an answer from me. But otoh, there are many more knowledgeable people on these lists, and you'd want them to see your question as well." Or I just might hit Delete on questions in my private inbox.
The "Delete" approach has become more attractive this afternoon after I pulled the following (anonymized) from my personal Inbox:
Great job breaking exim4 on my system with no easy way to fix it. $ /etc/init.d/exim4 start Starting MTA:DEBCONFsomethingDEBCONF found in exim configuration. This is most probably caused by you upgrading to exim4 4.67-3 or later without accepting the suggested conffile changes. Please read /usr/share/doc/exim4-config/NEWS.Debian.gz for 4.67-2 and 4.67-4 2007-07-17 11:31:57 Exim configuration error in line 25 of /var/lib/exim4/config.autogenerated.tmp: malformed macro definition Invalid new configfile /var/lib/exim4/config.autogenerated.tmp, not installing /var/lib/exim4/config.autogenerated.tmp to /var/lib/exim4/config.autogenerated I've been running exim4 v4.63 for awhile now and only have you bugger exim4-config it doesn't work.
I mean, this user has
- Not read NEWS.Debian.gz before updating
- Declined the configuration file updates that were offered by dpkg during the update.
- Received a clear-text error message explaining the issue and pointing to the docs.
- Vulgarly insulted the maintainer
I think I'm going to stop being responsive to users. They're not worth the blood pressure.
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Steve on :
I've had similar thoughts a few times. I think the one that bugs me the most is when I spend $time researching and fixing issues only to have my reply back to the reporter be bounced due to spam filtering, mail quota, or similar.
This is the last time I mentioned it, that I can remember:
http://www.debian-administration.org/users/Steve/weblog/163
Sebastian on :
For what its worth I think you did a commendable job in trying to help this person and are doing a great job maintaining Exim. I never once had a problem (which speaks for the quality of your packaging) and I think it to be a waste if you let yourself get discouraged by two... well, idiots. Of course there will always be the persons who act like this, but the vast majority is just happy with what you and the other DDs do.
I do not know if it is presumptuous but I would like to thank you on behalf of the silent majority: Thank you!
Greetings and do not let stuff like that get to you!
mentor on :
I always have this problem with users asking for support. Questions usually go along the lines of: I tried to do foo, and received bar output. To which the only reasonable response is: you need to read bar. Only rarely is the response to this a request for help in doing what bar says, or a statement that they really don't understand bar. Some of this may be due to perceived intimidation, however.
Russ Allbery on :
I had this problem enough that I wrote a web page about it and started linking to it in my sig. That helped a lot with private responses to mailing list or newsgroup postings. It might also help for those readers that actually look at the package documentation.
Feel free to do anything you wish with the text (link to it, copy it and modify it, whatever).
http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html
Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho on :
I usually reply to these mails with the message that I don't do private consulting and could they please mail the relevant mailing list (which I point out to them). I usually also say that the mailing list is likely to provide better and faster support that I could privately, were I willing.
Roger on :
As a tech support I feel for your problem , but NEWS.Debian.gz is only available to read after upgrading not before.
For many including myself exim4 is a critical package - but it also has a large number of conffiles.
I recently upgraded a critical machine to etch and given the nuber of packages involved reading all the NEWS.Debian files would have been a huge drain in time - to try a pick one or two gems out of - instead I relied on the Release Notes as the debian team write great notes.
Exim luckily upgraded smoothly but I was a little worried as we have customised or exim config heavily and I recognise the maintainers need to make incompatible changes - but the sheer number of individual conffiles - meant in the end I just keep my old config and decided to fix whatever broke .
If the maintainence team could improve the situation by allowing exim to use older configs temporially (leaving the package state as say broken - alhtough actually working) so sysadmin can examine the situation with the system runnign it would help.
(Yes it's a lot to ask but not all of us have dual redundant systems).
In future I will probably extract the system backup into a virtual machine partition and upgrade that one first to see what happens.
Marc 'Zugschlus' Haber on :
apt-listchanges will allow you to review NEWS.Debian and Changelog.Debian before the actual upgrade starts.
Yes, but they all build up to one configuration.
This might work with most packages, but some will need manual work.
That is of course our prerogative.
This does not seem possible to me without the packaging system cooperating.
I do that for really really critical boxes, yes.
Mike Banahan on :
I know it's frustrating for the package managers when this stuff happens. However, as a user who has only just discovered that apt-get dist-upgrade breaks my email system too, with no apparent easy route to return to a working configuration, I am now in a terrible situation. This is a really unpleasant situation for both sides.
The fact that there was a 'keep your old configuration option' looked safe to me, but now I have a broken installation and am probably going to spend several hours trying to fix it. We aren't all technical gurus (at least in the area of managing configurations) and it's hell on both sides by the look of things.
If it had been possible to keep my old exim and my old configuration, that would have been by far the best option for me, but now it's too late
Marc 'Zugschlus' Haber on :
If you don't tell us what happened, and how your system was "broken", noone is going to help you.
Marc 'Zugschlus' Haber on :
Now that lenny has been released, the issue pops up for stable updaters as well. Updaters not reading the error message. A fair amount of flamage has resulted from there in the last few days, which I have not approved but deleted instead.
To stop this, comments to this article are now closed.
If you find this article via $SEARCHENGINE, please go read the docs, and if you can't find your way around, ask on the appropriate support media, which are in the docs.