On 30 Apr 2013, at 15:20, Larry Stone wrote:
On Tue, 30 Apr 2013, Viktor Dukhovni wrote:
When it comes time to install, do I do "make install" or "make
upgrade"? It's not clear to me if "make upgrade" will work when the
upgrade is in a different location than the previous version.
You could consider the Postfix from macports.
I did consider Macports. Already did some testing with it and it
worked fine. But I became comfortable with building from source before
I learned about packages so prefer to continue that way when I can.
MacPorts is a mixed system akin to the FreeBSD ports subsystem: there
are some pre-built packages available but it is mostly just a collection
of build configuration files, links to source tarballs, and patches that
handle all the niggling little details for you. If you DO need to fiddle
with details, it's not hard to make local adjustments to Portfiles and
get exactly the variant you want.
Plus having some stuff from Macports and some from source seems to
cause some side issues.
Yes, it can. MacPorts creates its own world under /opt/local and uses
very limited parts of of the base system (e.g. the XCode build
toolchain) where necessary. There's no simple way to tell MacPorts that
you've installed dependencies outside of MacPorts that you want it to
use instead of its internal dependencies, but some software (e.g.
autoconf scripts and similar build tools) can sometimes find manually
installed stuff in /usr/local and use it instead of a MacPorts-installed
version. Hilarity (or something) ensues...
I have found that just using MacPorts where possible instead of
maintaining my own MacOS builds of open source software has been the
right choice, because I really don't get anything out of manually doing
the housekeeping that MacPorts handles for me, and I'm more likely to
make a mistake in it that I will discover because one component breaks
when I want it working. Do I really want to manually keep track of which
of the >100 OSS packages I have installed need rebuilding because I want
to fix latest OpenSSL oopsie? No, not really.
FWIW, I consider Lion (10.7) to be the last version of OS X for which
the Apple provided Postfix is usable. For Mountain Lion (10.8), they
changed a lot of the default directories but also removed amavisd-new
(compatability through OS upgrades apparently is not
something Apple thinks has value). Plus the pain of Apple provided
updates deciding to make changes to main.cf for "security" (Apple
considers having something listening 24/7 on port 25 to be a security
issue). So now, it's get off the Apple provided Postfix, then
amavisd-new, then see about upgrading to Mountain Lion.
Otherwise, "make install".
Thanks. I had a feeling that was the answer.
And it certainly can be. Just make sure that when you manually build
postfix, you don't blindly let it link into the base MacOS X world. That
can cause trouble (i.e. a need to rebuild) after any OS update, major or
minor. Apple makes no allowances for users replacing base components and
will not accommodate your reliance on a version of something in
/usr/lib/ that they no longer need.
