Problems with SA/Mailscanner using different perl versions

[Mark Fyvie]

Hi list,

 I have a small problem. Well actually it is not so small. I'm no linux
expert, but have had a bit of experience tinkering around on my Cobalt RAQ4
(based on Redhat), so please bear with me...

 I was running Mailscanner 4.30 and what I thought was SpamAssassin 2.63
(turns out that Mailscanner 4.30 was actually referencing a previous
installation of SA 2.55!). Last weekend I decided to upgrade to SpamAssassin
3.01, so at the same time I upgraded to MailScanner 4.35.

 After reading through all the help files, FAQs, and every bit of
documentation I could find for MailScanner and SpamAssassin I did make
considerable progress. For example, I discovered that SA 2.55 was still
being referenced by the new version of MailScanner and all sorts of other
issues. I completely purged my system of previous versions of both programs.

 Before I go on I should mention that I am running two versions of Perl, and
have been doing so for quite some time. The version which is shipped with
the RAQ4 is 5.005. I also installed 5.8.0 in parallel to this. If I need to
use the newer version in a given script I usually just change the
#!/usr/bin/perl line at the start of the script. Why did I keep the old
version of perl? Well after some investigation it seems that many of the
built-in functions and scripts used by the RAQ will break if the original
perl version is removed, so I decided to run both in parallel.

 Now the issue here is that the new SpamAssassin no longer works with any of
the old perl versions, so I installed it into my 5.8.0. The problem I have
is that MailScanner is running with my 5.005 version, so when SA.pm does its
check to see if SpamAssassin is present, it reports that it cannot find
SpamAssassin. I've tried playing with the paths in the MailScanner.conf
file, turning on all the debugs, adding the line #!/home/perl/bin/perl (this
points to 5.8.0) to SA.pm, but no luck.

 I tried to reinstall MailScanner (I always did it via make) to see if there
were any options I could choose to specify a different copy of perl, but I
could find no such options. I could find routines that searched for multiple
versions of perl and simply told the user that it wasn't a good idea. The
FAQ on the mailscanner site says something similar, along the lines of "It's
not bad to have more than one version, but you'll have less problems if you
choose just one".

 My problem is that I can't just have one version. My question is this: How
do I either A> Install mailscanner so that it uses my 5.8.0 version
exclusively, or B> Tell it to use 5.8.0 when it calls any scripts related to
the use of SpamAssassin?

 Thanks in advance for your help.

Regards,
Mark

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