Hi Bill, Bill Campbell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> On Mon, Jul 26, 2004, Simon Mudd wrote: > >Hello all, > > > >Are there any packaging guidelines for building RPM packages? Not how > >to build the rpm, but how to make a freshly installed package > >"behave". > > > >The reason that I ask is that I've been looking at the OpenPKG Postfix > >RPM and notice that, as installed, it will NEVER work correctly, > >something contrary to how the author expects his software to be > >installed[1]. > > > >Specifically: > > > >- the provided main.cf configuration file only allows connections from > > and to address 127.0.0.1 effectively disabling all non-local network > > activity.[2] > > This is intentional, for the same reason that SuSE and others have their > default configurations listening only on localhost, to prevent the clueless > from accidentally opening services that may be abused or exploited from the > outside world. That decision certainly is understandable. The OpenPKG RPMs seem to be well built, but I could not see any explicit reference to policies and certainly it is frustrating if this sort of thing is not explicitly stated. Other distributions are the same (or worse) so this is not a criticism of OpenPKG, more a request for clarification, which often in the long term helps everyone a lot. > >- the provided main.cf configuration file specifically sets various > > dummy configuration values which are WRONG (in the sense that if not > > changed they will generate errors). mydomain and myhostname are > > examples. > > Again this is intentional. One could change the example.com to the base > domain name, and the myhostname to the output of the ``hostname'' command, > but this can cause problems using ``hostname'' as that varies amongst *nix > systems (e.g. SuSE >= 8.0 returns the short hostname, not the FQDN). One > could do something automatic using a perl script with ``use Net::Domain;'' > to handle things like this or use the coreutils ``ghostname'' to do the > same thing. Again the question was more a clarification. I think the choice to explicitly configure the server to use a domain.com domain is not terribly helpful, but do understand that if the hostname output is not FQ then this will cause other issues. > ... > >For experienced users seeing what to change is not a problem, but it > >seems that this is not helpful for users new to the software. > > Letting totally inexperienced users do things they don't understand with > programs that can be abused and exploited from the Internet may not be a > very Good Idea(tm). Granted that the postfix default configuration is > pretty tight, the overall philosophy is to require people to think a little > before opening services to the world. Perhaps but I doubt an OpenPKG user is going to be "typical". My guess is that the majority of interest is probably going to come from organisations which use multiple OSes or versions of one OS. The average RPM user will be happy with yum or up2date, and the average Debian user with apt. My interest is for using the same RPM versions on RedHat 7.x, RedHat 9.x, different flavours of Solaris and (maybe if it works AIX 5). [snip] > >Not providing the package's own documentation (although man pages are > >included) is unhelpful. > > I tend to agree with that for many packages, but I don't think that's the > case isth postfix as it has full man pages, and the examples are well > commented. Examples and "HOWTOs" are always useful. Leaving them out is IMO a shame. [...] > Postfix is one of the OpenPKG packages that I modify before using, mostly > because I've added a ``/bin/rpm'' package, openpkg-postfix'', to the > postfix package that installs when ``/bin/rpm'' is found that ``Obsoletes: > postfix'' and ``Provides: smtp_daemon''. This works around a problems on > SuSE systems which will automatically reinstall their postfix if it's > removed because other SuSE RPMS require the ``smtp_daemon''. Yes, I can see certain packages fulfilling a "system role" and "requiring" something which tells the underlying OS that it is there. A dummy rpm for RPM distributions /etc/mail/mailer.conf for FreeBSD and their equivalents for other OSes/packages. Thanks for the comments. Regards, Simon ______________________________________________________________________ The OpenPKG Project www.openpkg.org User Communication List [EMAIL PROTECTED]
