Add things to the Solaris distribution?

Peter Bonivart peter at UCGBOOK.COM
Sat Aug 14 14:56:58 IST 2004


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Mike Brudenell wrote:
> Please could I put in a plea for the OPPOSITE of what everyone else seems
> to be wanting?
>
> Personally I really loathe packages which take it upon themselves to
> provide and install every single library/module they are themselves
> dependent on.  I'm sorry, but I take care to keep our Perl modules etc up
> to date using CPAN and hate the idea of a MailScanner installation
> tampering with it in any shape or form.  (I also take care to read notes
> about dependencies, and check we have them installed and up to date.)
>
> Consequently I've had to track down and work out where the MailScanner kit
> now lives within the distribution in order to continue to build it by hand.
>
> However the size of that kit has now bloated with all these other
> unnecessary (to me!) copies of Perl modules that are easily available using
> CPAN  ...  the only exception is the patched copy of MIME::Tools, which it
> *is* very useful to have to hand (at least until the day a suitable copy
> makes its way onto CPAN).

Well, not everyone is like you and me and want control over their
systems. Many prefer Linux over Solaris because of the RPM system. The
new tar dist is a wonderful way of bridging the gap between the all
manual way of the old tar dist and the almost automatic way of the RPM
dist. It saves a lot of time on new installations and even on upgrades
so you're updated with new Perl module versions, like lately the new
Archive::Zip 1.12.

Of course you can use the old way since it's still there in the dist, I
did so myself on my production systems the first time. The new way
worked very well though on my test systems so for 4.32.5 I used it on my
production systems as well.

My systems are dedicated for this task so I have no problem relying on
Julian to determine what Perl modules and versions I need for MS to work
well. Could be different if I had lots of other stuff running on them.

> Perhaps there might be mileage in separating the distribution into a
> "MailScanner" kit and a "support" kit, with the latter to be
> downloaded/unpacked into MailScanner's directory by those who want it?
> Either that or provide two tarballs: one with just MailScanner, and the
> other with the whole kaboodle?

Why having Julian administer this? The size of the dist is not that
large that it matters if it downloads in 10 seconds or in 20, especially
since it's at the most once a month. As long as the old tar dist is kept
in the dist unchanged I'm happy because then we can choose for ourself
and choice is a good thing. :-)

--
/Peter Bonivart

--Unix lovers do it in the Sun

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