Ease (or otherwise) of installation

[David Lee]

We run MailScanner on both Redhat and Solaris platforms.

My experience is that maintaining it is one of notable contrast: on Redhat
it is quick, painless and reliable, because of the "install.sh" script,
but on Solaris the process is much more labour-intensive and awkward and
probably error-prone.

A couple of weeks ago there was discussion on the list about possible
Solaris packaging.  Has any further thought been given to that?  A closely
related issue (a similar-sized headache!) is all the perl dependencies.
For Redhat/rpm users these are handled naturally, swiftly, painlessly and
automatically inside their "install.sh".  But for users of Solaris (and
other OSes, I presume) this seems considerably less straightforward.

Julian:  Could we come up with a model by which "install.sh" could
potentially be multi-OS?  OK, its first (only?) direct act might be to
dive off into OS-specific means to handle the various aspects, but it
would establish a coherent overall model for handling the bits of
functionality across a multitude of systems (using their own preferred
mechanisms).

Could you give it some thought?  Count me in as an enthusiastic guinea-pig
(and I could try to sketch some Solaris things, if you wish).


--

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