Anybody else running getmail on Ubuntu 18.04? and seen python2 link disappear?

Adrian Pepper <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.mail.getmail.user
Message-ID <[email protected]>
I have been running Ubuntu 18.04 lxc containers on my Ubuntu 16.04 ("bare metal") workstation for many months now.

Just recently a set of updates caused a scare as /usr/bin/getmail (5.5) was failing with "/usr/bin/python2: bad interpreter: No such file or directory" for a while.

For now I just did (after examining output of "locate python")...

   cd /usr/bin
   sudo ln -s python2.7 python2

And it works again.  "It" being (getmail and) my script which calls getmail to download messages and send them through a procmailrc.  For some messages that procmailrc forwards them to mail gateways on another 18.04 container on which I run "inn2".  This allows me to read some mailing lists as if they are newsgroups.  "trn" is much faster (better for skimming junk) than any mailreader.

I suspect an "apt-get autoremove" may have removed the /usr/bin/python2 link, though it's difficult to confirm.  (I.e. was not reproduced on another 18.04 container which has /usr/lib/python2 -> )  This isn't really a getmail problem, but it might be something some users might run into occasionally?  Indeed, "dpkg-query -S /usr/bin/python2" finds no package providing it.  I presume installing a python 2 package such as python2.7 creates it.  Perhaps something called by "autoremove" removed it under some assumption it would get replaced appropriately.


Adrian Pepper
[email protected]
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