On Wed, Jun 15, 2005 at 11:56:45AM +0100, Tim Jackson wrote:
> On Tue, 14 Jun 2005 16:51:24 +0100 (BST)
> Philip Hazel <ph10@???> wrote:
>
> [PCRE support in Exim]
>
> > (1) Insist on a system library being installed.
>
> Go for it, IMHO. As Nigel said, I'd rather have 1 copy of a library ...
Just to put in the counter example. I had an exim built against a system
berkeley DB library once. After one upgrade exim could no longer read
its DB files because the library had changed enough to cause a
problem. Much mail was rejected because of it.
Since then I have always built my own DB library and placed it in my
exim binary tree and linked exim against it so that when the other
admins type "yum update" there's a much reduced risk of exim suddenly
dying.
Relying on system libraries is fine as long as you can be sure that your
binary is compatible with all the point patches that will happen to the
library in the future. For something as critical as email I like to compile
my own version with only the libraries I require linked against it and with
those libraries not part of the system so they don't get updated by
automated management tools.
--
______ jonathan@??? Jonathan Knight,
/ Department of Computer Science
/ _ __ Telephone: +44 1782 583437 University of Keele, Keele,
(_/ (_) / / Fax : +44 1782 713082 Staffordshire. ST5 5BG. U.K.
