flexfax: Arlington Hewes' RPM for Linux under RedHat 5.1

[Nico Kadel-Garcia <raoul@cirl.meei.harvard.edu>]

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Downloaded from:
	ftp://ftp.tpc.int/pub/hylafax/hylafax-4.0pl2-1rh5.i386.rpm

So, I tried it out last weekend. And after some battle, I've come to
some conclusions about the very nice RPM created by Arlington Hewes
(known informally as Doug, if I remember right!).

1. Overall construction is good. It seems to do a complete job of
installation, and works well for my Sportster modem under RedHat 5.1, with
appropriate start-up scripts and warnings about HylaFAX specific needs
(Thanks, Doug: you did say to call you Doug, right?)

2. The dependencies are bad. The demand for ghostscript 5.10 fonts
forces one to either over-ride the dependencies or grab contributed
fonts. Unfortunately, the contributed fonts at the RedHat site and
mirrors demand ghostscript 5.02 or better. Unfortunately, the ghostscript
5.10 at those sites demands the "std" fonts. Unfortunately, this is
a mistaken RPM dependency for fonts other than those on the contrib
site, which has the 5.10 and 5.10 "other" fonts, not the "std" fonts.
And the fonts are almost all the same since many versions back.

Does anyone detect a theme here? RPM distributions should use the
*MINIMUM* necessary dependencies Requiring unnecessarily high versions
or extra tools just makes life harder for people trying to save disk
space or reduce their machine's complexity. The ghostscript 3.33 in
the distribution is *sufficient* for HylaFAX. Forcing the users to
grab several Meg more of software, when they are first setting up
their modems is pushy at best and will discourage them from using the
software.

If we have to use later ghostscript fonts, one of us should put up a
ghostscript font RPM that itself uses consistent dependencies.

3. There is an unnecessary dependency in the HylaFAX rpm on the "mawk"
rpm, when "gawk" is more than sufficient for HylaFAX.  That was
awkward, since I didn't have my CD's in hand and downloading spare
tools from over-loaded FTP sites can be a real pain in the
butt. Understandable, but somewhat irritating. Was this in the source?

4. I'll take a look later at the "faxsurvey" security hole, and the
"manpage" problem in the HTML and see if that's present in the RPM:
those are not Linux problems but HylaFAX problems with different
operating systems which may exist in this distribution.

5. RedHat 5.0 did not include /usr/local/bin in the standard $PATH,
RedHat 5.1 does. Therefore under 5.0 HylaFAX users need to add
this element if they use the RPM, which does use this.

My overall conclusion is that it's a good RPM, but it takes some
extra work to be perfect. I don't recommend it for the unwary, but for
people who don't want to compile and configure on their own yet.

See my next note for some other issues on "faxsurvey:...

			Nico Garcia
			Senior Engineer, CIRL 
			Mass. Eye and Ear Infirmary
			raoul@cirl.meei.harvard.edu

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