ssmtp-config fails on step 6

Ken Brown kbrown@cornell.edu
Sat Nov 20 22:26:52 GMT 2021


On 11/19/2021 7:07 PM, Andrey Repin via Cygwin wrote:
> alternatives is known to make links to nonexistent objects. While this is
> possible on *NIX, you can only link to existing objects on Windows.

You're talking about native Windows symlinks, not Cygwin symlinks.  The latter 
can point to nonexistent objects just as on *NIX.  This shouldn't fail unless 
the user has forced Cygwin to use native Windows symlinks by setting 
winsymlinks:nativestrict in the CYGWIN environment variable.

Kevin, have you done this?  If not, do you have any reason to think that 
alternatives failed to create symlinks?  What does 'ls -l 
/etc/alternatives/mta*' show?  On my system I see:

$ ls -l /etc/alternatives/mta*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 kbrown-admin None 19 2021-11-20 17:04 /etc/alternatives/mta -> 
/usr/sbin/ssmtp.exe*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 kbrown-admin None 19 2021-11-20 17:04 /etc/alternatives/mta-mailq 
-> /usr/sbin/ssmtp.exe*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 kbrown-admin None 19 2021-11-20 17:04 
/etc/alternatives/mta-newaliases -> /usr/sbin/ssmtp.exe*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 kbrown-admin None 19 2021-11-20 17:04 
/etc/alternatives/mta-sendmail -> /usr/sbin/ssmtp.exe*

I also have:

$ ls -l /usr/sbin/sendmail
lrwxrwxrwx 1 kbrown-admin None 21 2021-11-20 17:04 /usr/sbin/sendmail -> 
/etc/alternatives/mta*

and

$ /usr/sbin/alternatives.exe --display mta
mta - status is manual.
  link currently points to /usr/sbin/ssmtp.exe
/usr/sbin/ssmtp.exe - priority 0
  slave mta-sendmail: /usr/sbin/ssmtp.exe
  slave mta-mailq: /usr/sbin/ssmtp.exe
  slave mta-newaliases: /usr/sbin/ssmtp.exe
Current `best' version is /usr/sbin/ssmtp.exe.

Do you see something different on your system?

Last question: You said in your first post that "ssmtp-config fails silently" 
and that you isolated this to the alternatives command failing.  What do you 
mean when you say it failed?  Since it failed "silently", do you mean that 'echo 
$?' showed a nonzero error code?  Or do you mean that something is not working 
as expected?

Ken


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