Because of a four-year-old disagreement on the legal interpretation of the GPL and OpenSSL licenses, Debian is shipping a neutered and useless version of mail-notification without SSL support. Ubuntu hasn’t resolved the issue, so they’re shipping the same broken package too. People arguing about why they can’t fix bugs bores me. So here is a script to download the source packages, and rebuild them with SSL enabled. It even bumps the version number so that the package manager doesn’t try to overwrite your working package with the broken one in the repository. It also keeps track of the (on my system) thirty-seven megabytes of build dependency packages that it installs and removes them once the package is installed.

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