2009/5/14 Victor Duchovni <victor.ducho...@morganstanley.com>: > If the purpose of using RPM files is to facilitate binary updates from > distribution servers, wait until *your distribution* upgrades to a newer > supported version of Postfix. > > If you incorporate your own Postfix into your O/S, why download some > random stranger's binary RPM? > > Is there a real use case for binary RPMs not maintained by the > distribution release engineering teams? What's wrong with the Postfix > source, which is typically less likely to have ill-advised patches > dropped into it?
Sure; as people have already said, some vendors (cough, Redhat) don't really keep up to date. I haven't checked all their release channels on offer, but the core set of packages only includes Postfix 2.3.3. *And* it doesn't come with mysql/pgsql map support. This is when you go and get the package from the Centos-plus channel and then tell yum to ignore Redhat updates to Postfix so it doesn't clobber your working setup one day... So your real question is probably, "why not just use Postfix's source?". I can only speak for myself and my employer, but we maintain a lot of diverse systems, so we're a bit allergic to non-packaged software, no matter how easy it is to maintain (I've never used non-packaged Postfix, maybe it's really easy to maintain, but that's not the point). Packaged software is basically a requirement for sysadmin sanity. We could produce packaged versions of Postfix from source and put them in our internal repo, but we just don't have the time and resources to keep on top of updates and whatnot. I suspect people want something like DAG (http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/). Unfortunately for them, they don't have Postfix because everyone's already got it, just not the cutting edge. Fedora 10 is up to Postfix 2.5.5, I figure they'll have Postfix 2.6 in the next major version release. Which is like, every fortnight, right? :) Corey: > I'm running the same Postfix config I built years ago under probably > 2.2 or 2.3. Is there a document somewhere or a process by which I > can "modernize" the config? Periodically I'll be told that a line I'm > using is deprecated by something newer, and I'd like to get with the times... Sure, you probably want "upgrade-configuration", see `man 1 postfix`
