for a while now I am trying to install Spamassassin properly as root user with 'apt install spamassassin spamc'. The installation fails when it runs sa-compile producing following output:
Setting up sa-compile (3.4.4-1ubuntu1) ...
Running sa-compile (may take a long time)
Warning: Fake start-stop-daemon called, doing nothing.
chmod: cannot access '/var/lib/spamassassin/compiled': No such file or directory
dpkg: error processing package sa-compile (--configure):
installed sa-compile package post-installation script subprocess returned error exit status
After installation I can run sa-update and sa-compile manually and Spamassassin will start properly, but when installing spamass-milter or amavis the directory 'compiled' is removed and the same error occurs again. I tried changing the ownership of the directory to debian-spamd, also recreated the directory manually before running the installation. Even reinstalling Ubuntu 20.04 with the admin panel of my hoster (ip-projects) leads to exactly the same behavior. Building and installing Spamassassin from source works, but I got stuck on setting up the whole thing with spamass-milter (also built from source). This approach is also worse for maintainability. At first (weeks ago) I tried to install iRedMail as all-in-one mail solution. The installation got stuck at exactly the same point. I think the 'version' of Ubuntu 20.04 my hoster provides has some unusual configuration. I assume it has something todo with privileges but I really have no clue where to start. I would appreciate some help.
UPDATE: As Yannis suggested I ran the given commands. At first I got the following error:
dpkg: unrecoverable fatal error, aborting:
unknown system user 'amavis' in statoverride file; the system user got removed
I edited the statoverride file and removed the entries for user 'amavis' and removed the folders the amavis user should operate on (don't know why they were still there since I removed amavis yesterday with apt). Afterwards the command was successful. dpkg-reconfigure -a gives me unknown option 'a'. As well as the last command. Afterwards I restarted the server and tried to reinstall Spamassassin but the error is the same. When this seems an apt problem I ask myself why other packages like apache2, postfix or dovecot have installed flawlessly?
Regards Mario
The problem could be solved! The source of the problem was a damaged start-stop-daemon. Replacing the daemon in sbin/ solved the issue. The broken daemon was a bug in the distributed Ubuntu 20.04 installation at my hosters servers. Since the issue was solved by the support team of my hoster I am not able to go in more details here.
Regards Mario