Sendmail: Make doesn't make sendmail.cf from sendmail.mc

[Ben Eisenbraun]

On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 10:09:15PM -0400, Don Levey wrote:
> The "make -C /etc/mail" always did it for me, but I tried it as you
> suggested.  No error, but no new sendmail.cf.

It's not magic.  In order for 'make' to work, there has to be a Makefile.
E.g. on my Fedora 13 box:

$ ls -l /etc/mail/Makefile 
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 92 Sep 14  2010 /etc/mail/Makefile

It's pretty straightforward:

$ cat /etc/mail/Makefile
# Pass everything to the make script

all:
%: force
        @./make $@
force:;

$(MAKEFILE_LIST):;

So it's just calling the script at /etc/mail/make:

$ ls -l /etc/mail/make 
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root 2700 Sep 14  2010 /etc/mail/make

'make' has a debug mode, so you could, e.g.:

cd /etc/mail && sudo make -d

And that should print gobs of difficult to read but possible useful info on
why your aliases database is not being rebuilt.

Alternately you could call the shell script directly in shell tracing
turned on so you can see how it's being evaluated:

cd /etc/mail && sudo bash -x ./make

Things might be different on your Fedora 12 box, but the troubleshooting
would probably be similar.

-ben

--
success is going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiam.
                                              <sir winston churchill>