MailScanner version 4.65.3 and perl-MailTools-2.02-1.el4.rf HOWTO

[Greg Matthews]

Peter Farrow wrote:
> Michael Mansour wrote:
>> Hi Greg,

Hi Michael...

>> The fact that so many people use the 3rd party repo's
>> and can help resolve issues IMO outways any benefit to
>> building and maintaining things yourself, even if it's
>> twice a year.
>>
>> Community efforts to help others (as shown in the
>> Fedora world) really works, individual efforts may
>> benefit you in a very small way, but you can't know
>> everything.

Dont get me wrong, I'm 100% supportive of community supported software, 
and am active in the free software community myself. I certainly dont 
claim to know everything...!

I wasnt suggesting that I build everything from source. I was simply 
saying that Jules provides the software along with its dependencies and 
I use that rather than a repo that might provide everything with a "yum 
update".

Peter...

> "worry about unapproved upgrades from 3rd party breaking things
> in unexpected ways."

I tell it like I see it - the evidence is on this mailing list.

> I think this quote is a little harsh, in almost all cases the third 
> party repos have packages ahead of the official repos and save time and 
> effort in more cases than they break things.
> In my experience the 3rd party repos have what your going to end up with 
> anyway from the official repos, just bit ahead of time. 
> In any case its just two simple rpm commands to fix the problem that 
> takes under 60seconds to overcome.  IMO not a reason by itself to not 
> use third party repos.

no, the point is that my mail relays are far too mission critical to 
risk using 3rd party repos. The point of sticking with my distros 
offical repos is that I /know/ that those packages have been tested to a 
certain extent against exactly that distro and the offical packages. 
Once you start using a 3rd party, you cannot be sure if this package has 
been tested against that version of openssl or whatever.

I admit that the distros get it wrong occasionally (how many times will 
redhat break the automounter...?) but this is usually down to not being 
able to test every configuration, not version incompatibility.

Also, you are wrong when you say that the 3rd party repos have what 
you'll end up with eventually anyway. The long life distros (Suse, RHEL, 
Debian etc.) take great pains to /backport/ security fixes so that ABIs 
and APIs stay the same. Now you may have other reasons for disliking 
this approach but in a corporate setting it is very important.

> 
> Furthermore there is plenty of excellent support and help on this forum 
> to help identify problems such as these quickly and easily.

agreed, but for my own peace of mind I will stick with official repos 
and the packages provided as dependencies by JF. I know MS is tested 
with those versions so why risk it? Believe me, I know what its like to 
have 2500 users breathing down my neck - email is a very emotive service!

> 
> MailScanner has such a long list of requirements it make sense to test 
> out updates before going live with them.  I use a separate machine to 
> iron out the bumps.  I avoid updating MailScanner machines unecessarily 
> "for the sake of updating". 

we are in agreement here. I too use a dev/test box to dry run the 
updates and I'm also conservative about updating for no good enough 
reason. The same attitude that keeps me clear of rpmforge and the like.

Those repos are ideal for non-critical machines and for desktop users 
that are restricted by the distros limited package range (think redhat). 
But for corporate services, no way.

GREG

> Regards
> 
> Pete
> 
> 
> 


-- 
Greg Matthews           01491 692445
Head of UNIX/Linux, iTSS Wallingford

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