[OT] Debian Policy (was Re: [Mimedefang] Re: Quarantine location)

[Michael Sims]

Steffen Kaiser wrote:
> However, what would be the way to intelligently
> handle sendmail's .m4 conf script, without to disable lots of
> functionality?

I'm not expert in this sort of thing, but I would have expected for the package to
provide a sane default sendmail.mc and submit.mc, along with a Makefile to build the
*.cf files, and made the *.mc files conffiles, so changes to them don't get blown
away.  That way users get a working package immediately after install, but have the
ability to alter their *.mc files directly and run make to update the config, and
then package upgrades would be handled like any other Debian package...if there is a
change in the config then dpkg gives you the option to keep your changes, discard
them, view the diffs, etc.  Personally I don't understand why
/etc/mail/sendmail.conf even exists, if not to try and make things easier for folks.
However, exim is the default MTA in Debian (at least in Sarge), so it's my feeling
that if you chose to remove exim and install sendmail, you're probably not a newbie
and you probably don't need help with configuring sendmail.  If you did, you'd just
stick with exim, right?

> I had no problems with Postgres at all.

Ditto.

> I do, however, use my own perl version for my own perl programs as
> upgrading keeps overwriting any updated modules, to update the perl
> package or to install a newer (required) variant of a CPAN module
> broke the system or my own (perl) applications running on the server.

That shouldn't happen, unless I'm misunderstanding you.  Modules that you install
via the CPAN shell should go in /usr/local/lib/perl/x.x.x while modules installed
via dpkg should be in /usr/lib/perl/x.x.x  Package upgrades should not touch
/usr/local at all.  By default @INC has the /usr/local/lib directory first, so any
local packages should take precedence over the dpkg managed ones.  I've never had an
issue with using Debian's perl package, and I have lots of locally installed/updated
modules...