Fetchmail's fetchmail conf does not work on Gentoo

Fetchmail's fetchmail conf does not work on Gentoo

[Superfly Johnson]

Hi again Guix-Devel mailing list. I'm currently trying to configure a 
fetchmail daemon on my gentoo laptop to get mails. Unfortunately, 
fetchmailconf will not execute properly. It will always return line 2: 
exec: :: not found.

I have looked at the file it is trying to execute. The entire script is

#!/gnu/store/3jhfhxdf6v5ms10x5zmnl166dh3yhbr1-bash-minimal-5.1.16/bin/sh
exec : /fetchmailconf.py "$@"

It seems to me like the path to fetchmailconf needs to be corrected.

Re: Fetchmail's fetchmail conf does not work on Gentoo

[Andreas Enge]

Hello,

Am Thu, Sep 19, 2024 at 08:20:56PM -0400 schrieb Superfly Johnson:
> Hi again Guix-Devel mailing list. I'm currently trying to configure a
> fetchmail daemon on my gentoo laptop to get mails. Unfortunately,
> fetchmailconf will not execute properly. It will always return line 2: exec:
> :: not found.
> 
> I have looked at the file it is trying to execute. The entire script is
> 
> #!/gnu/store/3jhfhxdf6v5ms10x5zmnl166dh3yhbr1-bash-minimal-5.1.16/bin/sh
> exec : /fetchmailconf.py "$@"
> 
> It seems to me like the path to fetchmailconf needs to be corrected.

I have had a quick look, but definitely more needs to be done.
fetchmailconf.py is part of the source code, but it is not installed.

I tried to execute it, using "python3" instead of "python";
then it complains about
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/tmp/fetchmail-6.4.37/fetchmailconf.py", line 14, in <module>
    from past.builtins import execfile
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'past'

Apparently, and logically, this requires the python-future package.
So maybe this should become a propagated input?

I will stop here and let people who actually know Python intervene :)

Andreas

Re: Fetchmail's fetchmail conf does not work on Gentoo

[Tobias Geerinckx-Rice]

Do you know where that leading ':' is coming from?

It's sometimes used as shorthand for 'true' in shell scripts, and 'true' is sometimes used as a low-effort 'no-op', but the 'exec' builtin (rightfully) doesn't care about any of that:

  moloch:~λ exec :
  -bash: exec: :: not found

Kind regards,

T G-R

Sent on the go.  Excuse or enjoy my brevity.