[Mimedefang] Overcoming RPM stupidity

[Jeff Rife]

On 19 Dec 2006 at 22:09, Michael Lang wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 19, 2006 at 12:57:03PM -0600, Richard Laager wrote:
> > On Sun, 2006-12-17 at 20:46 -0500, Jeff Rife wrote:
> > > In the Fedora 6 RPM for MIMEDefang, mimedefang.pl was created using no 
> > > "Features" at all.  For most of them, this isn't a big deal, as I can 
> > > put "$Features{'whatever'} = 1" in mimedefang-filter and it works.
> > > 
> > > But, this isn't true for Unix::Syslog (or at least I haven't found a 
> > > way to overcome it).
> > 
> > I've been following the rest of this thread, but seriously, the subject
> > captures the problem. The Fedora 6 MIMEDefang RPM has a bug. Report it
> > to the Fedora people to get a fixed RPM. If you need a faster solution,
> > fix the RPM yourself and install that, then send them the patch.
> 
> that depends on what you define as a bug ... if there's a modular setup for
> the script an using Sys::Syslog is legal and okay it's not a bug.

Well, the bug has been reported and the solution they came up with to 
add perl-Unix-Syslog to the requirements for mimedefang...which will 
mean that anybody who for some reason wants to use Sys::Syslog can't.  
It's the exact opposite of my problem, but I don't suppose anybody else 
will notice.

I probably wouldn't have cared if my edits to mimedefang.pl hadn't been 
silently overwritten.

>                             Doing mystic things in %post and so isnt a good
> idea cause, you may shoot some dependencies used by other packages (conflicts
> with Unix::Syslog) or there's maybe no Network connectivity to CPAN mirrors, ...

Well, you could just build the package with and without Unix::Syslog 
available and diff all the files.  Then, when you find the one file 
that is changed is mimedefang.pl, you can have %post do a patch *if* a 
perl script finds that Unix::Syslog is installed on the system. 

Of course, if RPM had a more flexible "requirements" syntax, you could 
have things like optional requirements or "pick one of" (as this is).


--
Jeff Rife | "This?  This is ice.  This is what happens to 
          |  water when it gets too cold.  This?  This is 
          |  Kent.  This is what happens to people when 
          |  they get too sexually frustrated." 
          |         -- Chris Knight, "Real Genius"