[Mimedefang] Re: Using a provided-version of sendmail (not self-compiled)

[Kenneth Porter]

--On Wednesday, December 17, 2003 10:41 AM +0000 Rich Stanton
<richard.stanton1 at ntlworld.com> wrote:

> OK, thanks to everyone that replied - some very good advice from you all!
> There is a sendmail-devel package which I will grab, so hopefully that will
> work fine.  I just checked and, as someone else pointed out, the version of
> sendmail from the yellowdog repositories is not the latest so I need to find
> a src or binary rpm anyway, or build from source.  Bit of a shame really - I
> thought rpm would make keeping everything updated childsplay!

RPM helps, but it's not a panacea. It tracks the files and makes sure obsolete
stuff gets cleaned up.

I routinely build "custom" stuff from source RPM's, either from Rawhide if
it's available (since it will be more "tuned" to my Red Hat systems) or after
close inspection of the spec file supplied in tarballs or by 3rd parties.

> There are 2 spec file - mimedefang-spec.in & mimedefang.spec.  They look
> identical, are they?

The mimedefang-spec.in file is similar to Makefile.in and configure.in: It's
an input file that's fed to some script to create the "real" spec file. This
is typically done so that some macros can be expanded before the tarball is
assembled. For instance, the version number might be extracted from some other
file and placed in all the build scripts that need it. Look for a Make target
like "tarball" or "distro" that's used by the original developer to do final
tweaking of the source files before delivery.