Re: flexfax: New RPMs for hylafax-4.0 and libgr-2.0.14

[Phil Watkinson <pkw@elgro.co.uk>]

On Tue, 14 Oct 1997, Ramana Juvvadi wrote :
>Welcome to the new rpm of hylafax. One of the motivations for building
>this was to learn the capbilities of rpm.  Hylafax is a great package,
>but it doesn't work out of the box. It requires an elaborate setup. My
>aim in building this package is to reduce some of this complexity for
>Redhat Linux. I admit that this release falls short of that goal.
>However, I hope the situation improves in future releases.

[snip]

Good news. The HylaFAx rpm package for Linux boxes will be very 
popular, and perhaps the most popular of the binary distributions.
In this sense, it will be HylaFAX's 'flagship' product, and so has 
to be right.

With this in mind, could I give some feedback?

>   4.	It uses /usr instead of /usr/local in the tradition of rpm 

Fine, okay with me.

>   5.	It uses the directories /var/spool/hyla, /usr/lib/hyla instead of
>	/var/spool/fax, /usr/lib/fax. The reason is that there are two 
>	other fax pages for linux, efax and mgetty+sendfax. I feel it 
>	is better to have a unique name like
>	hyla than a generic one like fax causing mixup 

Not happy about this, though. I agree with Michael Irons that the potential
mixup from multiple fax programs is outweighed by the confusion amongst
users over the location of the spooling area and config files. Let's stick
with /var/spool/fax and /usr/lib/fax.


>   6.	The documentation directory is set to /usr/doc instead of /var/httpd 

Not a problem.


>   7.	There is an executable called xferstats in hylafax clashing with 
>	an xferstats from wu-ftpd. Hence its name is
>	changed to xferstat 

Hmmm. Can understand, and sympathise with the logic; but I feel this is 
one for Matthias Apitz, the offical maintainer, to decide. How about
'sendstats' as an alternative name? - comparable with sendq and recvq, etc.

Thanks for the work, and I know how long these projects can take, so your
efforts *are* appreciated,

Later,
Phil Watkinson,
Boston, UK.