Re: [Exim] Exim on Red Hat Linux?

On Sun, Aug 31, 2003 at 03:30:30PM -0700, Aviram Carmi said:
> However, I found out that neither Red Hat nor Mandrake have
> "built-in" support for exim.
>
> I am a complete novice when it comes to Linux, and I rather not
> install program from "scratch", nor would I like to mess up with the
> default OS configuration.

Frankly, this is something that is a valuable skill. If you don't want
to figure it out (and it really isn't all that hard) then you are stuck
with whatever the OS vendor (redhat or mandrake) offer, or hope that
someone creates a package for you (there are probably some out there,
but I didn't find any on rpmfind.net.) The question then becomes, do you
trust this third party package??

The build instructions are quite good. You really don't have to know any
programming to do it, and the configuration files have lots of nice
comments.

I actually did this last week for RH8. I uninstalled postfix and
sendmail (because for some reason, RH decided it needed both.) I had to
use a nodeps command line option to rpm to force it off due to
dependancy issues. Then I just compiled exim up and installed, and made
some manual symbolic links to the old sendmail locations. That's it.

Sometimes it may complain about missing the sendmail dependancies, but
you just force past those and you are fine. You can also tell redhat
that exim is a substitute for sendmail somehow to avoid that problem,
but that deals with creating a package which is just WAY too much
nonsense for me.

> Any ideas why, for example, Red Hat provides postfix with their
> distribution, and even provide a mechanism (a little utility program)
> to switch between sendmail and postfix, but completely ignores exim?

Who knows. Probabably just a matter of priorities, money, etc.

> Is there anything "wrong" with exim?

Nope. Works great.