Re: Status of getmail vs getmail6 discussion

Am 10.07.23 um 13:46 schrieb [email protected]
([email protected]):
> Hi Charles, hi all,
>
>
> I'm using getmail for many years now. The original getmail, from
> Charles, I've followed the copyright discussions with getmail's
> "getmail6" fork owner and decided to stay with getmail.
>
> Getmail gets all emails from my external accounts (like the one I'm
> sending this mailing list email from) and stores them in my
> self-hosted dovecot/IMAP installation on a VPS. All getmail as systemd
> units. Real time, if supported by email provider, systemd timer based
> scheduled, if not. Rock solid, simply loving it!
>
> I've just upgraded this VPS from OpenSUSE leap 15.4 to 15.5. And
> recognized now, that the distribution's pkg manager zypper now treats
> getmail6 as successor for getmail. Means, that zypper now always
> offers to remove pkgs for getmail, and newly install getmail6 pkgs
> instead.
>
> For myself of course I can tell zypper to ignore this unwanted pkg
> relationship. But as this distribution default IMHO seems to be not
> correct, I want to ask about the current, maybe final status of the
> getmail / getmail6 discussion. Last post I found is pretty long ago.

Distributors are between a rock and a hard place. They want to pull the
plug on Python 2 which is long dead, but they also don't want to take a
software as getmail away from their users, which is not Python 3 aware,
and as Charles has pointed out, that string/bytes/unicode/encoding stuff
from the migration to Python 3 would be nontrivial and amounts to close
to a rewrite.

My personal way if I were subscribed to the list and my distro's package
manager annoyed me were to either pin/lock/... however zypper calls the
"don't touch it!" switch of the venerable getmail package (I read
between your lines it has such features), or else install getmail from
source if the distro still ships a Python 2.7 interpreter (you may need
to tell your package admin tool that it wasn't automatically installed
and that it should be kept), and move on. It's not as though getmail
changed every other day. You only need to watch for updates in case
there are critical ones.