MailScannerGOLD [was Re: yum upgrade trouble]

[Steve Freegard]

Tom G. Christensen wrote:
> I suppose you're also packaging perl then, so you can control the global 
> @INC.

No - we're not currently packaging Perl as I felt that this would be too 
much duplication (base Perl is pretty large these days) and a lot of 
extra complication and possible confusion and more difficult for us to 
support.

Instead we use the system-wide perl and the system-wide modules but 
simply ensure that our modules are checked first either by using 
PERL5LIB in the applications init-scripts and via /etc/profile.d or via 
'use lib qw{/opt/fsl/perl5/lib}' in the actual perl apps themselves, 
although this might change if I find a better way to handle these cases.

> The custom Requires/Provides name space I guess was done by overriding 
> the perl_req and perl_prov scripts. Now writing these replacements are 
> probably not entirely trivial...

Yes, that's exactly what we're doing and no it wasn't particularly 
trivial to achieve ;-)

>> Using the .src.rpms that are output by our build system would mean that
>> the dependencies generated would be under the system-wide perl()
>> namespace as I don't have any plans to release the code to our build 
>> system.
>>
> Pity that ;)
> However you're ofcourse completely within your right to keep it to 
> yourself and I guess you have to have *some* secrets.

Yeah - plus our build scripts won't make a whole lot of sense to most 
people anyway.  RPM building like this is pretty hard - especially 
getting things installed in the correct order and satisfying all the 
build and run-time dependencies - I've spent quite a bit of time banging 
my head on my desk to get it working properly.

>> The beta repository will also be available to all.  This will always
>> contain the last MailScanner beta along with the last MailWatch beta and
>> all associated modules necessary to install.  Ultimately there will be
>> three repos 'staging' (FSL use only to test new modules) -> 'fsl-beta'
>> (Public access, for beta testing only, RPMs are moved here from
>> 'staging' repo after testing and finally 'fsl-main' (all FSL customers -
>> contains production RPMS moved in from beta after test phase).
>>
> This sounds very nice.
> 
> Thanks again Steve, this was a most informative post.

No problem - you're welcome.

Kind regards,
Steve.