Could not perform immediate config on exim4-daemon-light

[bennie91]

I'm more of a CentOS person, but after some issues on my new box I switched to Ubuntu server.
I am working on getting it setup as a mail server (mainly for testing at the moment and soon be live). I performed apt-get install sendmail then apt-get install exim4 and got the message:

Could not perform immediate configuration on 'exim4-daemon-light'. Please see man 5 apt.conf under APT:: Immediate-Configure for details.

I have Ubuntu Server 10.10 32-bit on a Dell Intel Poweredge.

[bennie91]

Anyone can help?

[koenn]

Immediate-Configure
Defaults to on which will cause APT to install essential and
important packages as fast as possible in the install/upgrade
operation. This is done to limit the effect of a failing dpkg(1)
call: If this option is disabled APT does treat an important
package in the same way as an extra package: Between the unpacking
of the important package A and his configuration can then be many
other unpack or configuration calls, e.g. for package B which has
no relation to A, but causes the dpkg call to fail (e.g. because
maintainer script of package B generates an error) which results in
a system state in which package A is unpacked but unconfigured -
each package depending on A is now no longer guaranteed to work as
their dependency on A is not longer satisfied. The immediate
configuration marker is also applied to all dependencies which can
generate a problem if the dependencies e.g. form a circle as a
dependency with the immediate flag is comparable with a
Pre-Dependency. So in theory it is possible that APT encounters a
situation in which it is unable to perform immediate configuration,
errors out and refers to this option so the user can deactivate the
immediate configuration temporarily to be able to perform an
install/upgrade again. Note the use of the word "theory" here as
this problem was only encountered by now in real world a few times
in non-stable distribution versions and was caused by wrong
dependencies of the package in question or by a system in an
already broken state, so you should not blindly disable this option
as the mentioned scenario above is not the only problem immediate
configuration can help to prevent in the first place. Before a big
operation like dist-upgrade is run with this option disabled it
should be tried to explicitly install the package APT is unable to
configure immediately, but please make sure to report your problem
also to your distribution and to the APT team with the buglink
below so they can work on improving or correcting the upgrade
process.

questions ?

[Dleonard0]

questions ?

Yes. WTF?

I hit the same problem uninstalling sendmail and trying to install exim4-daemon-light.

E: Could not perform immediate configuration on 'exim4-daemon-light'.Please see man 5 apt.conf under APT::Immediate-Configure for details. (2)

The solution turned out to be to first

# apt-get install exim4-base exim4-config

then

# apt-get install exim4-daemon-light

[koenn]

looks like the dependencies are not handled correctly

[ergosteur]

Thanks for this.
Had the same problem on my new 10.10 server. I wonder if a bug should be filed?

[pehden]

FOUND FIX

sudo apt-get install sendmail




it will remove postfix and it works for reinstalling it
im not trying to use exim4 though so if you are then my fix might not work for you.

[xeorex]

I fixed it doing this:

$ apt-get purge mail*
This shows the packages that are going to be removed
Now it is a matter of removing these packages without installing exim4.

$ dpkg --force-all -r sendmail-cf
$ dpkg --force-all -r sendmail-bin
$ dpkg --force-all -r sendmail-base

After this I was able to run this again:

$ apt-get purge mail*
$ apt-get -f install

That removed the packages left and installed exim4 in place.
rkhunter was the package causing problem to me.

Reconfigure exim4:

$ dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config

But got this message:

Stopping MTA for restart:.
Restarting MTA: exim4.
ALERT: exim paniclog /var/log/exim4/paniclog has non-zero size, mail system possibly broken ... failed!

Fixed this by deleting paniclog:

$ rm /var/log/exim4/paniclog

Then again:

$ dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config

And finally got this:

Stopping MTA for restart:.
Restarting MTA: exim4.

This was on a Debian 6 squeeze though but I hope it helps.

[eode]

I don't know if this will work for Ubuntu, but this problem was killing me. I finally found that installing exim4-base first works. It took me a long time to find. Since I found this thread early in my search, and I use Ubuntu a lot, I figured I'd post it here for anyone who needs it.

sudo apt-get install exim4-base
sudo apt-get install exim4

Credit:
http://forum.linode.com/viewtopic.php?p=39352