[Mimedefang] Re: Quarantine location

Kris Deugau kdeugau at vianet.ca
Fri Aug 26 13:09:20 EDT 2005


NFN Smith wrote:
> Kris Deugau wrote:
> > (As for "Why isn't it where I expect it?", the answer is probably
> > "Debian Policy".  IIRC at one point the quarantine and work
> > directories were the same by default in the official MD tarball
> > though.)

> So, the fact that the box in question is running Debian is
> significant.

Maybe, maybe not.  Debian package maintainers seem to delight in "Doing
Things Differently" for a lot of packages, but maybe that's just my
background learning all of the RedHat-isms first.  <g>

'Debian Policy' certainly has a fairly large effect on where things get
placed on the filesystem, and what files are considered "user-opaque"
(ie, don't tweak here unless you want upgrades to mangle your tweaks) vs
user-tweakable.

It's also been a while since I built that local backported package, and
even longer since I looked into what I do with the RPM packages I've
built for RedHat-ish systems.  I don't recall offhand whether MD will
create separate spool and quarantine dirs by default, or if I munged in
an ./configure option to the RPM packages somewhere along the line.
(Just checked;  the RPM I built for my own personal systems *does*
explicitly set separate directories for spool and quarantine.  And it
looks like that's now the default direct from the official tarball too.)

> It will be worth seeing if a setting in mimedefang-filter will work.

It should.  Most "global" variables like that are accessible in
mimedefang-filter, and since they don't change during normal execution
(or shouldn't...) you should be OK as long as you put the definition
near the top of the file.  The man page for mimedefang-filter should
have a list.

> Because this is Debian, I won't try to tweak the mimedefang.pl script.

That applies to ANY files from ANY binary package for ANY distro,
really;  tweaking the installed files *will* break things if an upgrade
comes down the pipe.

> I discovered the hard way that with Debian, you don't want to tweak
> anything except files that are normally configured, especially
> scripts.
>    I'm also running SquirrelMail, and found that for some reason the
> maintainer of that package for Debian commented out three or four
> lines of code in a PHP script, disabling a feature I wanted.  It was
> simple to reenable the code, but then when an update was distributed
> through apt-get, my tweaks were overwritten with an original copy of
> the script.

I had a similar problem, except it was a local customization of the
interface (well beyond what's provided as a limited "skinning" ability
in Squirrel IIRC).  I eventually created a patch I can just reapply
whenever Squirrel gets upgraded.  <g>

-kgd
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