[Sussex] point for info on exim4

[Geoff Teale]

On Thu, 2004-07-15 at 07:48, Thomas Adam wrote:
> Trying to do a "simple sid backport" of this nature with exim4 is not
> going to be a good idea, in the long run. As to why you would want to
> compile it yourself, when you could use a backport, other than for your
> own amusement is beyond me. That said, you can *try* the following (but
> be aware that doing this from Sid might not work -- given the core
> library mismatched versions):

Good points generally.  

Given that we maintain what is basically a "Debian based distro" to run
our product on I'm a little under-cautious about "rolling my own" debian
packages and pulling in new bits from sid as needed.

As for the compiling from source, well there are a number of reasons why
you might want to.  Many, many programs have options that can only be
switched on at compile time - it's one of the valid claims Gentoo has
for being source based (certainly more valid than speed increase claims
for users who don't really understand GCC and how it's options relate to
their CPU of choice).

A good example of a package that is useless (for us at least) in it's
standard debian binary is openLDAP.  Exim we currently use out of the
box, and I'm not really aware of what compile time options is has.

-- 
Geoff Teale
Cmed Technology