On Wed, 16 Jan 2008, John Jetmore wrote: > Is this a good idea? Is the motivation primarily ease of maintenance or > is there perceived value to the end user? This change will significantly > increase my own server maintenance and I don't even maintain that many > servers. I love the fact that exim has always been self contained if > desired.
Strictly, Exim has never been self-contained, because it needs a DBM library. In its early days, before pretty well every distribution had a DBM library, people had to install one when they installed Exim. PCRE is kind of in the same boat - originally it was rare, but nowadays, most distributions have it. > Perhaps it could be a build-time option to use an onboard pcre vs a system > pcre? Lately, the onboard PCRE has become more and more of a hack, because the "real" PCRE's build system has changed a lot. If I hadn't retired, sooner or later I would have made this change. Of course you are right about ease of maintenance, but on at least one occasion there was a different kind of problem when Exim was linked against something (can't remember what - maybe a database?) that itself used PCRE, but expected the system version - so clashes of function name occurred. I'm sorry if it gives you more work, but I do think it is the "right way to go". Philip -- Philip Hazel -- ## List details at http://lists.exim.org/mailman/listinfo/exim-dev Exim details at http://www.exim.org/ ##
