fetchmail broken after etch update - a kludgy fix

[Patrick Wiseman]

Hello, all:

I did my weekly aptitude update on my etch system yesterday.  It included an upgrade of fetchmail.  When asked whether I wanted to replace the configuration file, I declined, because I had a customized line in there which I wanted to keep:

OPTIONS="--daemon 300 --syslog"

But apparently, in declining, I failed to set an environment variable, START_DAEMON, which the new /etc/init.d/fetchmail wants to be there.  If it's not, the script bails out because of the following lines:

if [ ! "x$START_DAEMON" = "xyes" ]; then
       echo "Edit /etc/default/fetchmail to start fetchmail"
       exit 0
fi

I tried 'dpkg-reconfigure fetchmail' but it simply gave me the above error message.

Temporarily, I have commented out the above lines, and my fetchmail is working again, but obviously that's a kludge.  Any suggestions as to how I can clean things up?

Thanks
Patrick