[INN-COMMITTERS] STABLE-2_4 inn (configure configure.in)

Bill Sellers W.A.Sellers at larc.nasa.gov
Tue Sep 2 20:04:05 UTC 2003


 At 10:11 AM 9/2/2003 -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
I'm certainly willing to be persuaded that it should just look in
/usr/sbin and /usr/lib and not look in the user's PATH (either works for
me; I think that only looking in /usr/sbin or /usr/lib is mildly more
correct and kept the PATH search just so that the behavior isn't as
different from the current behavior).  But I think the current behavior is
broken, after years of watching its implications.  It means that
practically everyone compiling INN has to pass an explicit --with-sendmail
flag to configure, when most people normally don't even have to think
about where sendmail is located.

Note that the *only* place this configure result is used in INN is in
inn.conf, which the user should really be reviewing anyway, and it's the
first entry in the file.  So if we do guess wrong, it's pretty easy to
both find and fix.  And if we're using a buggy version of sendmail, that
really doesn't matter much, since we're only using it to send mail and our
demands on it are pretty severely limited.

What does everyone else think about this?  Sorry that I didn't bring it up
first.

Russ, I am one of the people that complained about the --with-sendmail
recently.  My objection is that a package using autoconf should compile
with:

./configure
make
make install

Unless the are unresolved dependencies, it should work.  On a Solaris 8
system, sendmail is installed by default via Solaris in /usr/lib, and
configure should pick up on it.  If someone else needs to override this,
thenthey should use --with-sendmail.  I think this will all boil down to a
preference or philosophy.

My objection is that the ./configure fails on a default install of a Solaris
system, as sendmail is installed in /usr/lib and /usr/lib is not by default
on root's path.  This makes it look like a fatal error of some sort.  On
Linux, it picks it up because sendmail is in /usr/sbin, and /usr/sbin is on
root's path.  So, on Solaris, if I follow the INSTALL file, it fails; yet it
works fine on Linux.



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