[Popcon-developers] Bug#741104: popularity-contest: Silently fails to send anything if no MTA configured

[Lauri Nurmi]

Package: popularity-contest
Version: 1.49
Severity: grave
Tags: d-i


Popularity-contest silently fails to send any information when an MTA has not been configured on localhost (which is very common 
nowadays, that is why I selected grave severity).

The first user's $MAIL gets filled with delivery failure notifications like this:

---
From: Mail Delivery System <Mailer-Daemon at xxxx>
To: root at xxxx
Subject: Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender

This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

  survey at popcon.debian.org
    Mailing to remote domains not supported
---

This host is not used for sending nor receiving mail, so for ages I did not even look at $MAIL, and the failures remained 
unseen.

Popularity-contest should either use HTTP for submitting its data, or ask for the outgoing SMTP server's address at 
installation. Whether or not there is an option to configure outgoing SMTP, I don't know and don't care. Its address is not 
queried during installation, so 90% of people who thought they would be participating in popularity contest are not actually 
participating. Whatever statistics are gathered, are severely biased.


-- System Information:
Debian Release: 6.0.9
  APT prefers oldstable-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'oldstable-updates'), (500, 'oldstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.32-5-686 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=fi_FI.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=fi_FI.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages popularity-contest depends on:
ii  debconf [debconf-2.0]         1.5.36.1   Debian configuration management sy
ii  dpkg                          1.15.8.13  Debian package management system

Versions of packages popularity-contest recommends:
ii  cron                     3.0pl1-116      process scheduling daemon
ii  exim4                    4.72-6+squeeze3 metapackage to ease Exim MTA (v4) 
ii  exim4-daemon-light [mail 4.72-6+squeeze3 lightweight Exim MTA (v4) daemon

Versions of packages popularity-contest suggests:
pn  anacron                       <none>     (no description available)

-- debconf information:
  popularity-contest/submiturls:
* popularity-contest/participate: true