Configuration issues

[Julian Field]

At 17:40 25/10/2002, you wrote:
>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?

Indeed "you" do :-)

>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.

There are limits...

>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?

If we can find someone who is already a CPAN module maintainer, that would
be ideal as they would know all about how to do it.

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

I think we would just need to get agreement from Eryq (the author) that
someone else takes it over from him. I can't see that as being too much of
a problem, as he hasn't done anything with it himself for a very long time now.

> > >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...).

Once I've seen it work with Linux and Solaris, it will be worth getting
contributions/fixes from other people such as yourself. But it's not quite
there yet.
--
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