Wednesday, February 11, 2009

IndiMail now has a RPM and Yum repository

Using Red Hat Package Manager (RPM) is a popular way of installing software on Linux systems. I have been always comfortable with the usual ./configure; make; sudo make install-strip.

Not everyone is comfortable with gory details involved during compilation. So with some effort I started reading RPM manuals on the net. The first two days I found it quite tough getting things together but after the exercise, the knowledge gained has helped me to tweak the configure scripts and makefiles better.

IndiMail now longer uses hard-coded directories inside Makefiles. Libraries for example now go into @libdir@ in Makefile.am. This resolves to /usr/lib on 32 bit systems and /usr/lib64 on 64 bit systems.

The biggest learning came from Open Build Server (OBS). The service provides software developers with a tool to create and release open source software for openSUSE and other Linux distributions easily on different hardware architectures and for a broad user audience. Users can easily find the latest open source packages they are looking for and customize them.
The biggest advantage of OBS is that it is quite unforgiving. It took me 4 complete days before I could generate the first successful RPM package. Compared to that, building the RPM on my own laptop was trivial.

Currently, the list of supported distributions for IndiMail is (for both 32 and 64 bit)
  • SUSE
    • openSUSE 11.2
    • openSUSE 11.1
    • openSUSE 11.0
    • SUSE Linux Enterprise 11
    • SUSE Linux Enterprise 10
    • openSUSE Factory
  • Red Hat
    • Fedora 13
    • Fedora 12
    • Fedora 11
    • Fedora 10
    • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5
    • CentOS 5
  • Mandriva Linux
    • Mandriva 2010
    • Mandriva 2009.1
    • Mandriva 2009
The RPM's can be downloaded here. You will find directories for the above Linux distros. Each directory has a Yum Repository file. You can save the .repo file in /etc/yum.repos.d for yum to automatically download and install IndiMail. The RPM are part of IndiMail from Release 1.3.4.

IndiMail Queue Mechanism

Indimail has the ability of configuring multiple local and remote queues. A queue is a location on your hard disk where email are deposited ...