12/12/2006
Struggling with RHEL
At work, I just converted my FreeBSD 4.11 box to RHEL 4.0U3.
It’s been quite a pain as I used my FreeBSD box as an IMAP server, using courier-imap, and now I have to build courier-imap for RHEL, as it doesn’t seem to be supported by Red Hat.
This is supposed to be easy - supposedly you can just download the .tar.bz2 file and then run rpmbuild -ta on it. However, this led to a few hours of resolving dependencies, fixing the completely broken gcc and g++ that came with my image, and trying to figure out how our in-house packaging tool interacts with rpm, yum, up2date, and a bazillion scattered files and directories. I also had a few diversions where I looked into getting yum and apt-get going, with the latter now seemingly working with one repository (ATrpms), but I’m afraid to use it.
I wish I could use something like Ubuntu for my desktop machine. RHEL doesn’t have the best selection of packages and I prefer apt over rpm. Hopefully, I’ll get more comfortable with it over time, but right now I’m really wishing that I had Ubuntu or Debian or Gentoo.
And now that I’ve mentioned Gentoo, I know that I’m going to get a great rant from Chris on RHEL suckage… 
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[insert rant about RHEL suckage here]
[insert rant about Courier suckage here]
[insert rant about Cyrus being the only way to go here]
What’s wrong with Courier? Why is Cyrus the only way to go? I heard that Cyrus uses some kind of mailbox storage format that is not mbox or Maildir - that kinda scares me.
Chris says:
Because it doesn’t slavishly follow mail folder formats that were outdated by imap. There is a new competitor to Cyrus out there that seems to be able to match it. The name escapes me right now, but I stick with Cyrus because I know it. You aren’t locked thanks to the wonders of IMAP. Plus the format is kind of like Maildir+, so you can still access the individual messages pretty easily.
You should consider wu-imap or dovecot.