Pardon me for butting in, but this is something that's strong on my
mind, also. I have Exim 3.35 installed, would love to go to 4.10, but
cannot decide on the procedure I wish to follow.
On Mon, Oct 14, 2002 at 05:56:27PM +0200, Andreas Metzler wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 12, 2002 at 02:23:29AM +0800, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:
> > baptista@??? (Paulo Henrique Baptista de Oliveira) writes:
> >> I'm still forced to use exim 3 because debian unstable isnt supporting
> >> exim 4 oficially yet.
>
> > "Forced"?
>
> Laziness, or valueing a nice tested system more than the using the
> newest latest version of exim.
>
> > Why does Debian make so many people afraid of compiling their own code,
>
> > just because there isn't an official package, what stops you
> > from compiling exim from source?
>
> Hello,
> It is not about being afraid or not - installing the package relieves
> me of _lots_ of work:
> - Debian provides security updates
> - Debian provides nice upgrades (think of switching from db2 to db3)
> - The package is customized for debian: The locking method and
> correct path for incoming spool on debian systems is used.
> - Debian provides bug tracking.
> - Debian provides compiled binaries.
> - The Debian package is already tested.
>
> If I did not want this benefits I'd use http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/
Exactly.. I moved to Debian on account of .deb packaging, and am a bit
reluctant to begin "wildcard" additions. As Andreas has said, I'm not
afraid to compile the package, but I hate to do something that will mess
up the nice clean, packaging system.
> > You could just build a deb package for yourself if you want to keep things
> > cleaner...
Yes, this is one way.. This, or installing one of the unofficial
packages.. I've downloaded a couple of .debs, Marc Merlin's with the
sa-exim patch, and another from somewhere else. I tried a "dpkg
--no-act install" for each.. with Marc's, I'll have to first remove
exim 3.5, and with it all packages that depend upon
mail-transport-agent. I know that I could reinstall them, but it's
still a bit of extra work. Also, removing exim wouldn't removing exim
remove the /etc/init.d, cron, etc files, too? And I don't believe that
these would be installed with the generic compiled package. With the
other package, it seems to not balk - I believe it's control classifies
it as an exim replacement, but I notice that this package, at least,
has a few things that I'd like to have not compiled in..
So.. would there be anything wrong with just leaving exim3 installed,
this would satisfy the m-t-a dependencies, and leave all the other
exim-related things in place.. Then compile exim4 to go into
/usr/local/bin, put a symlink to exim4 in as /usr/sbin/exim.. Then it
might be good to put a "hold" on exim and leave it like that unless and
until a suitable package for exim might appear on Debian. Is there any
way that this could cause a problem? Not exactly "The Debian Way", but
workable? I'm not sure I'm capable of creating a bona-fide deb package
yet, and it seems that creating an equivs package would be no less
offbeat than my idea.
