Configuration issues

[David Lee]

On Fri, 25 Oct 2002, Julian Field wrote:

> At 16:58 25/10/2002, you wrote:
> [...]
> >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.

Errmmm...  Who is the "you"?!  Do I detect some admirable linguistic
subtlety there?

The ideal person, of course, would be Julian.  But (seriously) I recognise
that he might see this as a "last straw" or "bridge too far" for him.

Me?  Although I *use* CPAN, and have occasionally contributed bugfixes and
features to module authors, I have never maintained one.

Is there anyone on this list who is already a CPAN module maintainer?

Anyway, thanks for the agreement about the principle.  What licensing
issues might there be?  (IANAL.)

> >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.

Indeed: been there (5.00xx->5.6.x), done that, got the sunburn.  Hence my
inclusion of the phrase "modules ... *offer to*".

> >[ 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.

Fair enough.


> >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.

I might (no promises) take a look.  But that depends heavily on adjusting
the autotools stuff.  Read on...


> >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.

Chickens and eggs.  Distribute it (with a massive health warning, if you
wish) and then we then could help you fix it.  And, yes, that is an offer
(albeit with the "could" and "help" qualifiers...).


--

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