Re: [exim] Maintaining Exim version up-to-date in EPEL

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Autor: Alain Williams
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Dla: exim-users
Temat: Re: [exim] Maintaining Exim version up-to-date in EPEL
On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 10:42:15AM +0100, Merlin Hartley wrote:
> I get 4.84 from EPEL in CentOS 7:
> https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/7/x86_64/repoview/exim.html <https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/7/x86_64/repoview/exim.html>
>
> Presumably you are still using an ancient operating system <wink> ;)


The whole point of using something like CentOS/RedHat is to have a stable
platform that you can just let run for 10 years. This is why they are reluctant to
update packages - in case it breaks something.

One of the nice things about exim is that new versions work with old
configurations - so upgrading should not break anything. However the EPEL
maintainers might not see things that way. They sometimes have multiple versions
of something in a repo, eg python & python27 .... we might pursuade them to have
exim and exim-latest - then anyone installing exim-latest would acknowledge that
their config might break as the cost for the latest feature.

They might be reluctant to do this - perceived extra work, much of which would
be QA/testing. I would be willing to help on a project of maintaining
exim-latest for EPEL (centos 6 (i386/x86_64) & centos 7 (x86_64)) - I can run on
my own machines but would need others to also test.


I raised this with the EPEL exim maintainers in Oct 2012.

After a bit the reply that I got was:

> > as a co-maintainer and after the review I rejected to make an
> > EPEL rebase because there are a lot of code changes including
> > several config / behavioral changes, so the rebase would be
> > certainly against EPEL policy which goal is to bring stable
> > enterprise class environment. Feel free to contact package
> > owner if you think it's EPEL OK


I got the feeling of pushing a stone up hill with my nose and so rebuilt it
myself and distributed to what I cared about.

https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/package/exim/

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Alain Williams
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