The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Olivier Salaun <address@concealed>]

Hi,

Nicolas Brouard wrote:

> I just updated my linux version of our mailing-list server which runs
> "sympa". I have been surprised by the facility of implementing linux using
> the Mandrake distribution! I hope that it is the same for the other
> distributions.
> 
> Mandrake is really 'up to date' for many softwares (KDE2), perl, mhonarc
> etc., but not for sympa which is still stuck on version 2.2 (the actual CVS
> version is 3.3b7!). So, I have been able to reinstall from scratch all the
> linux tools that I need, Apache, Gnu-Emacs, PdfLaTeX, g77 in 30 minutes but
> since then I have spent more than 3 days to install a more recent version of
> sympa.

> I have tried to understand why the sympa version distributed by Mandrake
> does not evolve.

Actually we thought Mandrake was following Sympa evolutions...
They provided first version of sympa.spec ; we are now maintaining
the SPEC and RPM.

> The team of sympa developpers put a more recent (3.3b4) rpm for redhat and
> even for mandrake but you can't use it (cypher Perl is required but if you
> install it from CPAN, some data base is not updated and rpm don't want to
> install latest sympa-mdk.rpm). The only solution is to download the SRPMS
> and try to understand how the SPECS and even the Makefile.am and
> configure.in are done by the sympa team and differ from the Mandrake team.

Makefile.am and configure.in are recent improvements of Sympa installation
process. 

We found out recently that perl-Cipher-Saber was not available as a RPM ;
unfortunately we don't have time to build this RPM. Maybe mandrake
could provide it...

> To be brief the Sympa team wants to put everything in /home/sympa (bin, etc)
> and the Mandrake team have specific directories /var/sympa, /var/lib/sympa,
> /usr/lib/sympa/run, /etc/sympa/sympa.conf /etc/sympa/wwsympa.conf ; even
> wwsympa.fcgi has to be put with other cgi-bin in
> /var/www/cgi-bin/wwsympa.fcgi.
>
> It seems to me that the Mandrake logic is much more general and is mandatory
> for someone who wants to update not only a few softwares but hundred of
> softwares with each new linux release.

We are willing to make sympa's RPM Mandrake-compliant ; we just don't
use it ourselves and had no complain about it untill now.

Maybe Jerome Dumonteil (Mandrakesoft) could provide some help...

> To adapt the sympa-mdk.rpm to Mandrake standard we need a newer
> parametrization of the different sympa Makefiles (there is no "make
> Makefile" in sympa) but I think that it is necessary to do it. Otherwise it
> will be too much work for the Mandrake team to it themselves at each
> release. And as I presume they will never accept the Sympa team directory
> logic which is less general, the distribution of sympa will suffer as it is
> already suffering now.

Sympa install process allows enough customization to match Mandrake's
FS hierarchy. We just need some information about it...

> What are the arguments of the Sympa team to not generalize and spread the
> different directories of a running sympa distribution?

We have no Mandrake installed...

> Mandrake is really impressive, Sympa too. So, why this problem? And this
> huge amount of time lost for anybody who wants to install a recent version
> of sympa (at least with encrypted passwords!).

Information/contributions are welcome to make Sympa's RPMs better.

We don't have that kind of problem with Debian packages because somebody
else is doing the packaging job (thank you Jerome :)). 

--
Olivier Salaün
Comité Réseau des Universités