yum repositories, was: Just some ideas for upcoming MailScanner releases

[Tom G. Christensen]

Richard Siddall wrote:
> Julian Field wrote:
>> Does someone want to tell me how to set up a yum repository so you can 
>> do this?
>>
> 
> It's a little more complicated than setting up "a" repository.  There
> are multiple RPM-based distros (anyone want anything other than
> CentOS/RHEL and SUSE?), multiple versions of said distros (anyone still
> using CentOS/RHEL 4.x?), and you'll want a stable and a testing repo for
> each distro version.
> 
I think you can pretty much count on RHEL 3->5 seeing serious use.
I still have Mailscanner gateways running RHEL 2.1 but it's late in its 
lifecycle (EOL 2009-03-31) so probably not worth targetting.

With a proper buildsystem and good quality specfiles it should not be a 
problem building for all of RHEL 3,4,5, just look at rpmforge.

<snip>
> Which isn't that bad if you've got a VPS for each distro version, or a
> volunteer to maintain that version for you.
>
IMHO the most sane way to maintain a package for multiple distros is the 
rpmforge way of one specfile pr. package. Combined with a buildsystem 
like mock you can quite easily maintain builds for many different dists 
on a single machine.

> Another approach that might work would be to join RPMForge, or give Dag
> Wieers (etc.) an updated mailscanner.spec or SRPM to build from. 
> Offloading repo support to RPMForge (and a few other entities) would 
> make your life easier in some respects.  I don't know if they operate a 
> shared build farm.
> 
I'd think Dag would be positive if Julian offered to maintain a 
MailScanner specfile in rpmforge SVN.
The alternative could be to fork the necessary packages from rpmforge 
into sort of an rpmforge for MailScanner sub repo.
Julian would maintain a branch of rpmforge SVN for MailScanner, only 
building the packages needed for MailScanner and tagging them with jf or 
somesuch.

How do you propose to solve the problem that it's not really possible to 
upgrade a number of core perl modules using rpms without installing with 
--force due to file conflicts?
The distro perl packages where simply not designed for this in RHEL.
This is the biggest blocker against 'yum install MailScanner' as I see it.
My personal solution has been to fork the distro perl package and split 
it up into upgradeable subpackages, I prefer having to maintain that 
over using rpm --force.

-tgc