Things to be aware of when writing auto-updates

David Lee t.d.lee at DURHAM.AC.UK
Mon Jan 14 15:37:04 GMT 2002


On Mon, 14 Jan 2002, Jonathan B. Bayer wrote:

> [Nick Phillips had earlier written: ]
>
> NP> If you have a look at Julian's auto-update script for sophos, you'll see
> NP> how it works.
>
> It's wrong, or rather, sweep.pl is wrong.  Sweep.pl uses the lock file
> in /tmp, when it should really be in /var/lock (under most Linux
> distributions that I know of).

Off-list, I have discussed with Julian and Nick the possibility of using
automake and autoconf to help build and install MailScanner, handling and
managing a wide variety of platforms and local conventions.  I'm hoping to
send them my initial work (which I have already used on our three
MailScanner machines) later this week.

A natural part of this would be the GNU "localstatedir" convention for
handling just this sort of thing.  Hopefully that should help towards
managing the placement of things such as lock files.

Hope that helps.

--

:  David Lee                                I.T. Service          :
:  Systems Programmer                       Computer Centre       :
:                                           University of Durham  :
:  http://www.dur.ac.uk/t.d.lee/            South Road            :
:                                           Durham                :
:  Phone: +44 191 374 2882                  U.K.                  :



More information about the MailScanner mailing list