The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Dan Pritts <address@concealed>]

On Tue, Apr 06, 2010 at 03:41:21PM +0200, Daniel Maher wrote:
> All of this leads to my final question : is there an official .spec file 
> available that works ?

The answer to this question is almost certainly no.

What follows are my notes about making sympa work on RHEL5, using
third-party RPMs when possible.  Given the situatino with CGI and
Time::HiRes (see below) I'm not sure this was all worth it but it's what
i did.

My notes indicated I needed these RPMs, which I got from either
redhat or rpmforge:

        perl-libwww-perl
        perl-DBD-mysql
        perl-DBI
        perl-LDAP
        perl-Archive-Zip
        perl-Email-Date-Format
        perl-FCGI
        perl-File-Copy-Recursive
        perl-HTML-Format
        perl-HTML-Tree
        perl-IO-stringy
        perl-libintl
        perl-MIME-Charset
        perl-MIME-EncWords
        perl-MIME-Lite
        perl-MailTools
        perl-Net-Netmask
        perl-Regexp-Common
        perl-Template-Toolkit
        perl-Term-ProgressBar
        perl-XML-LibXML
        perl-Crypt-CipherSaber
        perl-IO-Socket-SSL
        perl-Net-SSLeay
        perl-SOAP-Lite


Additionally, I discovered that the CGI and Time::HiRes modules 
are built in to RHEL's perl RPMs, and the versions installed are too old for
sympa's taste.

Since they're in the RHEL perl RPM there's no clean way to update them
separately.  I chose to create a custom module root, and install them there
via CPAN.pm.  I think that if I'd just installed them "normally" via CPAN,
it might have put everything in /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl, which would not 
conflict with anything else, but i was nervous that this wouldn't really 
happen
properly, so i put it in an separate area (under /usr/local/pkg in our case).

Also, I installed MHonarc from the mhonarc author's RPM.  

This meant that i had to modify the main programs to add an appropriate
"use lib" line at the beginning.  Things mostly worked when I simply
added the appropriate PERL5LIB env to the init script, but the cgi needed
hardcoding (or so it seems, putting the appropriate line in httpd.conf
was not sufficient, i guess perl or fastcgi cleanses the environment)

Additionally, rpmforge did not have a working fastcgi apache module, but
EPEL did, so i grabbed only that from EPEL.  

If you choose to install in non-default locations (I wanted data in /sympa) 
be careful, there are various hardcoded places that you will run into.
I've submitted bugs on all that I know about; one I have listed in my notes is
that bounce_dir is hardcoded in sympa/constants.pm, setting it in sympa.conf
has no effect.


danno
--
Dan Pritts, Sr. Systems Engineer
Internet2
office: +1-734-352-4953 | mobile: +1-734-834-7224

Internet2 Spring Member Meeting
April 26-28, 2010 - Arlington, Virginia
http://events.internet2.edu/2010/spring-mm/