BARRACUDA.txt.sh uninstalls dovecot-common

It is probably a side result of fairly aggressive apt-get upgrade procedure we use to avoid broken-in-the-middle upgrades for various system level stuff. Barracuda doesn't uninstall anything - it is apt-get or aptitude incremental or related dependencies which can lead to some unexpected issues if there are services installed besides those managed by Barracuda.

We would need detailed install log for debugging, but I don't think we can avoid such issues when there is unexpected extra software installed.

Unfortunately, we can't guarantee anything for any extra stuff installed on the server. I'm afraid you need to watch it and manage on your own, as Barracuda can't be aware of anything installed extra and at the same time it has to force aggressive apt-get procedures to guarantee reliable upgrades of included system libraries and various services.

Happened to me after recent update to 2.0.3 too :-( Barracuda removed Dovecot, SASL and some related bits, no emails for me until I re-added these modules and a couple of config files.

Is this really something that can't be avoided? Didn't #1388704: Support standard Aptitude for all system updates w/o the need to run Barracuda make any difference here?

Reopening in hope...

We can't be responsible for anything added/installed besides the packages installed by Barracuda, so if you are adding other services, you are on your own.

As for apt-get only upgrades, please read also this important update: http://drupal.org/node/1587786#comment-6011582

We may *try* to be friendly to other packages, but since BOA doesn't track them and doesn't support, there is no guarantee it will work.

Could you attach a full backend log for this upgrade resulting with removal of dovecot? You can find it in the file /var/backups/barracuda-upgrade-DATE-TIME.log.

Hi Grace, thanks for considering this issue again... barracuda-upgrade-120519-1559.log attached as requested.

Looking through it it's clear when Barracuda removes the mysql package to replace it, all the dependent stuff gets dropped too... I wonder if there would be a way for the scripts to list the installed mysql-dependent packages somehow and then re-install them at the end?

And a .conf file got dropped on my box too, so I'm not sure if you're purging packages but if so maybe it'd be possible only purge the key packages for BOA and just 'gently' uninstall dependencies so everything comes back when they're re-installed.

I realise the above probably has knock-on effects, but really it's the 'other half' of #1388704: Support standard Aptitude for all system updates w/o the need to run Barracuda insofar as allowing BOA stuff to not nuke other server components...

Thanks,

Jim

Futher to my last, apt-cache rdepends [package] will list the dependent packages which could be then used to re-install (and avoid purging) non-BOA packages that get dropped when Barracuda nukes the packages it needs to update. Might need to be combined with dpkg --get-selections.

E.g.:

$ apt-cache rdepends mysql-common 
mysql-common
Reverse Depends:
  mysql-server-5.1
  mysql-client-5.1
  libmysqlclient16
  mysql-cluster-server-5.1
  mysql-cluster-client-5.1
  mysql-server-5.1
  mysql-client-5.1
  libmysqlclient16

I don't think we can reliably avoid issues like this if we allow BOA to watch and re-install packages removed because of purged dependencies on mysql re-install etc. BOA needs to be aggressive to avoid broken upgrades and overridden configuration etc. Re-installing packages we don't support or track may just open a Pandora's box.

It will be possible when we will convert most of BOA bash code to Ansible, and you will be able to add your custom stuff as an extension Ansible understands and will be able to track and support without affecting BOA itself.