[bind10-dev] BIND 10 Adventures on a Debian Super-Stable System

[Shane Kerr]

All,

I installed BIND 10 on box running the previous version of Debian stable
last week (Debian "lenny", version 5.0.8 to be precise). Debian is
always a bit stale, and running the previous version means "really old".
However, it will still be supported until 2012-04, and there are people
running various "enterprise Linux"; which as far as I can tell is a
codeword for "never change anything until I retire" (RHEL has a 7-year
'regular life cycle' and another 3-year 'extended life cycle). 

Anyway, I don't know that we need to worry about installing on systems
from 2001, but I thought I would relate the issues I had getting BIND 10
installed on this system.

The main problem was all of the dependencies. Packages were available
for a lot of stuff, but I needed to install some things from source:

      * Botan (1.10.1)
      * log4cplus (1.0.4)
      * Boost (1.47.0)
      * Python 3.2.1

Boost in particular took a LOOOOOOOOOONG time to build. We use it in
header-only mode, so if I was smart I would have just installed those,
but I figured me figuring out Boost's hand-crafted install system was
more trouble than just running the stuff in the background.

I did have an issue with Python, which is that I had not installed
SQLite first, so it happily installed without complaint but did not
support SQLite from Python. This was only noticed when I tried to run
the server. Right now we require SQLite, but when we make it optional
we'll need to add a check for Python support too - at least then I would
have noticed it.

Anyway, so there weren't any major problems, just a lot of seeing
where ./configure breaks, then waiting for things to compile and
install, then trying again.

I have a proposal on how to make it more automated and easier on users,
which I will make in a separate post.

--
Shane