On Sat, 12 Oct 2002 02:23:29 +0800 Suresh Ramasubramanian <mallet@???> wrote:
> "Forced"?
>
> Why does Debian make so many people afraid of compiling their own code,
> or
> of using anything other than eximconfig to configure exim, for that
> matter?
> :(
>
> This is not intended as a flame against Debian, which is doubtless a fine
> distro... but just because there isn't an official package, what stops
> you
> from compiling exim from source?
having played at both sides...
i continue to build my own exim regardless of any rpms, debs, whatever,
because i have my own idiosyncratic ways of doing these setups (and every
couple of months or years, i change my prefered layout, just to keep myself
sufficiently confused.)
in production environments, whether small, medium, or large shops, usually
with a couple of sysadmins (but maybe only one) there is a powerful case to
be made for using prepacked distributions regardless, in particular where
you have numerous systems that need to be consistent. otherwise, you end up
with update nightmares. i've never made it formal policy in any site for
which i've had responsibility, but i can imagine more rigid IT manager
doing so.
now that i have a number of client sites with limited sysadmin resources on
site, it becomes even more painfully obvious to me that in resource limited
situations (clients with a little money and a little staff) that steps need
to be taken to keep system administration costs under tight control, and
the ease of installation/upgrade of using someone else's canned package is
very attractive in such circumstances.
so when someone says "i'm forced to use a .deb/.rpm/whatever of an older
version", i can understand what is probably going on and sympathize.
richard
--
Richard Welty rwelty@???
Averill Park Networking 518-573-7592
Unix, Linux, IP Network Engineering, Security
