[pmg-devel] [PATCH package-rebuilds v2 1/1] fetchmail: improve shipped service file

[Max R. Carrara]

On Thu Sep 25, 2025 at 7:07 PM CEST, Max R. Carrara wrote:
> On Wed Sep 24, 2025 at 8:05 PM CEST, Stoiko Ivanov wrote:
> > fetchmail exits with exit-code 3 if:
> > 'The user authentication step failed...' (see fetchmail(1)).
> > This also includes the case if there are no accounts configured for
> > fetching, e.g. if all accounts are configured with 'skip' instead of
> > 'poll'. In PMG you get this when temporary disaling all configured
> > accounts in the GUI.
>
> s/disaling/disabling ;)
>
> >
> > So we simply should not consider an exit of 3 as failure.
> > Additionally adapt the Restart value to 'on-failure' (else systemd
> > tries restarting 5 times and gives up)
> > see systemd.service(5).
>
> But wouldn't this mean that if I e.g. temporarily disable all configured
> accounts, `fetchmail.service` would exit with `3` and then never restart
> again? Or am I mistaken here?
>
> That being said, `fetchmail.service` refuses to start for me on my most
> recent test VMs, even though I have added a dummy entry in the UI.
> I might be holding it wrong, but `/etc/default/fetchmail` is never being
> written to; it's empty for me.
>
> # systemctl status fetchmail.service
> ○ fetchmail.service - fetchmail mail retriever agent
>      Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/fetchmail.service; enabled; preset: enabled)
>      Active: inactive (dead) (Result: exec-condition) since Thu 2025-09-25 18:47:38 CEST; 6min ago
>  Invocation: e87235808c58412883ec5c2ad55ab248
>   Condition: start condition unmet at Thu 2025-09-25 18:47:38 CEST; 6min ago
>        Docs: man:fetchmail(1)
>     Process: 2239 ExecCondition=/bin/sh -c [ "$START_DAEMON" = "yes" ] (code=exited, status=1/FAILURE)
>    Mem peak: 1.7M
>         CPU: 5ms
>
> Sep 25 18:47:38 pmg-9-beta-01 systemd[1]: Starting fetchmail.service - fetchmail mail retriever agent...
> Sep 25 18:47:38 pmg-9-beta-01 systemd[1]: fetchmail.service: Skipped due to 'exec-condition'.
> Sep 25 18:47:38 pmg-9-beta-01 systemd[1]: Condition check resulted in fetchmail.service - fetchmail mail retriever agent being skipped.

Quick follow-up regarding fetchmail.service: As we just spotted
off-list, `/etc/default/fetchmail` isn't set up during installation,
and also doesn't appear after `apt-get install --reinstall fetchmail`.

>
>
> All of that aside, I think it would make more sense to keep
> `Restart=always` but add `SuccessExitStatus=3`, as well as
> `RestartSec=` to control how quickly the service is restarted [0].
>
> Since the daemonized fetchmail sleeps for 300 seconds before running
> again, we could maybe set `RestartSec=300`, so that systemd waits for
> five minutes before trying to start `fetchmail.service` again. That way
> the daemon isn't restarted immediately when it fails; or in other words,
> mails are fetched every 5 minutes, even on failure.
>
> Additionally, it might be favorable to explicitly set
> `StartLimitIntervalSec=` and `StartLimitBurst=` [1] here, because the
> default retry count is 5 (as you already noticed), in case setting
> `RestartSec` alone is insufficient for some reason.
>
> FWIW, you can find the defaults for the above two values using
> `cat /etc/systemd/system.conf | grep StartLimit`
>
> [0]: `man 5 systemd.service`
> [1]: `man 5 systemd.unit`

Also as discussed off-list, the above changes aren't necessary and yours
down below are fine; I hadn't considered that we manually restart
`fetchmail.service` if the user updates the config. Might be nice to
note that in the commit message for future reference though. (That is,
that we let the service exit gracefully here and that it's restarted
automatically when the user adds or re-enables the fetchmail accounts
via the UI).

>
> >
> > Signed-off-by: Stoiko Ivanov <s.ivanov at proxmox.com>
> > ---
> >  pkgs/fetchmail/fetchmail-6.4.39/debian/fetchmail.service | 3 ++-
> >  1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
> >
> > diff --git a/pkgs/fetchmail/fetchmail-6.4.39/debian/fetchmail.service b/pkgs/fetchmail/fetchmail-6.4.39/debian/fetchmail.service
> > index a6e3168..b7260ac 100644
> > --- a/pkgs/fetchmail/fetchmail-6.4.39/debian/fetchmail.service
> > +++ b/pkgs/fetchmail/fetchmail-6.4.39/debian/fetchmail.service
> > @@ -21,7 +21,8 @@ User=fetchmail
> >  Type=exec
> >  # sort $OPTIONS after "-daemon 300" to allow overwriting the interval using $OPTIONS
> >  ExecStart=/usr/bin/fetchmail --daemon 300 $OPTIONS --nodetach -f /etc/fetchmailrc --pidfile /run/fetchmail/fetchmail.pid
> > -Restart=always
> > +SuccessExitStatus=3
> > +Restart=on-failure
> >  
> >  [Install]
> >  WantedBy=multi-user.target