MailScanner-5.4.5-3 ms-configure fails when building SpamAssassin

[Wolfgang Baudler]

When I run "/usr/sbin/ms-configure --update" after installing the latest
MailScanner-5.4.5-3.rhel.noarch.rpm (this is on a RHEL7.9 system, fully
patched), the ms-configure hangs for a while trying to build and test
Mail-SpamAssassin-4.000000 and then fails with this error:

Building and testing Mail-SpamAssassin-4.000000 ... FAIL
! Timed out (> 1800s). Use --verbose to retry.
Terminated

When I run a strace on one of the perl processes during the "hang" period,
I get these repeated syscalls:

select(8, [3 5], NULL, NULL, NULL)      = 1 (in [5])
read(5, "spam_pid not found: Sleeping 7 -"..., 65536) = 44
write(2, "spam_pid not found: Sleeping 7 -"..., 44) = 44
...

Looks like it is trying to start and test spamd, but fails for some reason.

Any insights why this might be happening? Thanks.

PS:
https://www.mail-archive.com/users@spamassassin.apache.org/msg110257.html
seems to mention the same issue on an Ubuntu system