MailScanner on yum repository

[Mark Nienberg]

Jason Ede wrote:
> Hugo,
> 
> When do you plan to put 4.66 onto the yum respository?
> 
> I’ve used it to install mailscanner and it went on like a dream apart 
> from needing the mailtools patch for which I’ll need to wait for 4.66

I played around with the repo too when I was setting up a new server.  Initially I 
thought I could use the yum priorities plugin to prevent installation of packages 
from rpmforge that were already in the centOS base repo. This won't work though, 
because one of the requires for MailScanner is a recent SA and there is an old SA 
package in the base repo, so the priorities plugin prevents yum from finding the new 
SA package in rpmforge.  You have to disable the priorities plugin or assign rpmforge 
an equal priority with the base repo, which effectively does the same thing.

Then the problem of package updates in the rpmforge repo breaking a working 
MailScanner started to show up.

Upon further reflection, I think there are a few ways to make this work.  One would 
be to specify exact package version requirements in the mailscanner-wrapper spec 
file. So instead of:

Requires: perl-MIME-tools >= 5.412

specify the exact package known to work with MailScanner.  This should be the version 
provided in Julian's install package.  I think yum would then refuse to upgrade those 
packages when new ones come out on rpmforge, which would be good.  In fact, this 
would be an improvement over using Julian's installation script, because having the 
mailscanner-wrapper rpm installed would protect you against updates that might break 
your mailscanner.

Another option would be to maintain a complete repo with all the packages needed, and 
then use the priorities plugin to give this repo a higher priority than rpmforge.  I 
don't know much about maintaining repos. Maybe the packages are just copied over from 
rpmforge.

I confess that ultimately I went back to the standard install script (which works 
perfectly well of course), but I think the repo method could be made to work with 
some volunteer effort, and may even offer some advantages as outlined above.

Mark