I'm currently working on replacing a few RedHat 7.3 boxen with Debian systems- Debian primarily because it's what head office is using.
Due to some of the software in Debian stable being really *badly* outdated (ie, SpamAssassin), and some just plain missing (ClamAV, MIMEDefang, and an assortment of Perl bits), I've set up apt sources pointing to backports.org, but there's nothing there for MIMEDefang. I've since managed to reasonably quickly and cleanly backport MIMEDefang from testing- with a few tweaks I consider NECESSARY- compile options, so post-install tweaking isn't really an option. :/ However, I've just discovered that there's also a bad version mismatch between the "default" libdb version used by DB_File in RedHat, and the one in Debian (db3 in RedHat vs db1 [I think] in Debian). I also discovered that this has been included as a part of the monolithic perl-5.6.1 package, and I *really* don't want to go anywhere near backporting that myself or using a third-party backport. I discovered this in trying to get the SA2.63 install (from backports.org) to recognize the ~40M global Bayes dbs and per-user AWL files; instead I discover pairs of .dir + .pag files for AWL (which I vaguely recall are an artifact of db1) and SA won't open the existing bayes_* files. Is there something like cpan2rpm or cpanflute for Debian? I'd like to pull in current versions of Perl modules (or even just recompile the stable version against different libs). Among other things, I've very carefully made sure that there is NOT a C compiler on the new production boxen. Otherwise, I'd just use CPAN and put up with two package management systems instead of one. :( I *could* hack together some bits to force db3 to work by building on RedHat, and using alien to install... but that's just plain ugly and as I've already discovered it *will* break because of differences in how RedHat and Debian handle the core Perl install and addon modules. -kgd -- "Sendmail administration is not black magic. There are legitimate technical reasons why it requires the sacrificing of a live chicken." - Unknown
