On Thu, 2005-12-15 at 09:47 +0000, Tim Jackson wrote:
> As some of you know, packaging of apps (RPM based) is one of my topics
> of interest and indeed I have been sort of (or not, as the case may be)
> maintaining some Exim RPMs on ftp.exim.org.
>
> Exim is a bit of a PITA to package, because there are so many different
> options that you end up either building every possible option and
> ending up in dependency hell where an Exim install pulls in hundreds of
> dependencies, or you pick an arbitrary subset of options and leave some
> people out in the cold. The main problem is with lookups, where you can
> choose to compile in support for many different databases from DBM to
> MySQL to LDAP.
>
> One nice solution to this as used by many other apps is to use
> dynamically loadable modules, where you have a "core" binary that
> contains the core of the app, and most/all options that have external
> dependencies are built separately as modules that can be dlopen()d at
> runtime. These can then be packaged separately in RPMs (or debs, or
> whatever), meaning you end up with stuff like:
>
> exim
> exim-mysql
> exim-ldap
> exim-pgsql
> ...
>
> and you simply install "exim" plus whichever of the optional extensions
> you want.
We'd love to use this for Fedora/RHEL too. Did you make any progress
after Tony pointed out that you needed '--export-dynamic'?
--
dwmw2
