install.sh

[Drew Marshall]

David Lee said:
> On Tue, 9 Mar 2004, John Rudd wrote:
>
>> So, what exactly does install.sh do?
>
> Good question.  In fact, in the light of your later comments, it is two
> subtly different questions:
>
> 1. What does it do now on Redhat Linux (and systems that already use it)?
>
> 2. What differences would it make/involve/force on other systems (that
>    don't yet use it)?
>
>> I tend to shove mailscanner into /opt/mailscanner-$VERSION and work on
>> it there until I'm ready to put it into production.  When that's ready,
>> I remove the symlink "/opt/mailscanner" and point it at the new version
>> (so I keep the old one around so I can fall back to it if there's a
>> problem).
>
> That's exactly what I, too, do on our Solaris systems.  But we both also
> have to do more than that.  We need to check, grab, build and install the
> various pre-requisite perl modules.  We have to check cron jobs.  We have
> to check "/etc/init.d" things.  We have to check "/etc/default" things.
> All this is manual and, let's face it, potentially error-prone (in the
> "pilot (i.e. my) error" sense).

I used to do exactly the same on various Linux distros that I have run. I
never really got on with RH (A personal thing, really).
>
<Snip>
>
> Of course, there is a measure of trust involved.  Would I rather trust a
> prebuilt "install.sh", or my own "configure/make/test/install cycle"?  We
> still need to consider that on a case-by-case basis.  In the case of
> MailScanner, I trust (through experience) Julian's "install.sh" for RH.
>
I then moved to FreeBSD with it's ports system (From Gentoo whcih gave me
my forst taste of package management systems), which you end up having to
trust and not had a problem (Yet?)

<Snip>
> On Solaris, I've come unstuck with MailScanner because various upgrades
> have sometimes required (I later discovered via debug/slog etc.!) changes
> to the details in "/etc/init.d/sendmail" or similar.  By contrast MS's
> "install.sh" seems to get it right, and to do so swiftly, cleanly and
> efficiently.
>
> I used to be very much pro-Solaris, pro-"configure/make/test/install".
> But I'm slowly coming round to appreciate the ease (from trusted sources)
> of prebuilt "install.sh" behaviour.  Especially in something as complex as
> MailScanner (with its perl pre-requisites, /etc/init.d interactions,
> /etc/default interactions, cron jobs, etc.).
>
As mentioned before, I too came from this background and have since found
that by issuing one command I can upgrade MailScanner and the upgrade even
pre-merges my MailScanner.conf file ready for final checks and moving to
production status. Takes seconds rather than the hours it used to.

> Indeed because of the tedium of doing this on Solaris, we have often been
> running way out-of-date versions of MS.

Now I can run the latest versions with ease and minimal fuss. Would I go
back? Not likely!!
>
> Returning to your "work on it there until I'm ready to put it into
> production".

The other question is if the installation system does the majority of the
work for you there is only a small amount of extra configuration to
complete, you don't have to worry so much about being ready to 'put it in
to producion' as the chances of configuration or installation errors are
smaller. I guess if you prefer to get deep into how to make it all marry
into your system then run with the manual system (And preferably on an OS
that doesn't use package management). If you prefer to make the thing work
quickly and move on then my feeling is package management (Preferably with
dependency checking etc). I wouldn't expect a FreeBSDer who installed from
the excellent port (My thanks and compliments to Jan-Peter for his
hardwork) to ever post about a missing perl library as is often seen on
this list.

My 2p anyway!

Drew

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