Configuration issues

[Julian Field]

At 16:58 25/10/2002, you wrote:
>Several recent threads have concerned issues of install-time configuration
>of MailScanner.
>
>This email starts as various disparate items, but they come together at
>the end.
>
>CPAN (1)
>~~~~~~~~
>In principle, using CPAN would seem to be a Good Thing for many people.
>(It is certainly my preferred way of working.)  But there have been
>niggles such as a recent thread about "Make::"(?) and the fact that
>MIME-tools seems to need additional patches.
>
>MIME-tools:  Given that these patches are so vital, would it not be
>possible, Julian, to get these patches rolled into MIME-tools?

Believe me, people have tried. The original author is a bit, shall we say,
"unresponsive".

>And if
>there is some awkward political problem there about its maintenance, could
>you (or perhaps we, the MailScanner community) fork another project from
>that (licensing permitting)?  A good, clean, well-maintained, CPAN-based
>module would be most helpful.

Good idea. I doubt you would need to respond to feature-requests, just
incorporate security patches that people send you. Shouldn't be much work
once you've got set up properly.

>CPAN(2)
>~~~~~~~
>Many CPAN modules that have other modules as pre-requisites can themselves
>detect this and offer to download/install those modules.  Is there some
>way that the build/install of MailScanner could itself do this?

The most common pre-requisite that I've seen CPAN try to install is Perl
5.8. *I* will decide when I want to upgrade my entire Perl installation,
not CPAN.

>[ Blue sky: could parts of MailScanner itself become CPAN packages?? ]

That's a possibility, but little of it would be any use for any other
purpose. It really is an application, whereas CPAN deals with libraries.

>RPM-analogous items: (e.g. Solaris pkg):
>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>Is there any mileage in producing, in addition to Redhat RPMs, the
>equivalents for Solaris pkg and other packaging systems?  Note that I'm
>NOT asking Julian actually to do this: read on...

I would appreciate it if some people would do things like this. The Debian
community have done this, it would be nice for some Solaris users to pick
up the gauntlet.

>autoconf/automake
>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>Much of the above would require adjustment to the build-time side of
>MailScanner.  It is now using autoconf behind the scenes.  (Indeed, I
>recall submitting quite a lot of autoconf sketches to you or Nick some
>months ago: was it any use?).  Please could you include the autotools
>stuff (configure.in, configure, Makefile.am etc.)  with the distribution
>(analogous to the way GNU projects, samba, linux-ha etc. do)?

We've got to get the autoconf stuff fixed so it works more reliably first.

>Implicit in all the above, of course, is gratitude for a great product.

:-)

--
Julian Field                Teaching Systems Manager
jkf at ecs.soton.ac.uk         Dept. of Electronics & Computer Science
Tel. 023 8059 2817          University of Southampton
                             Southampton SO17 1BJ