flexfax: Announcement: RPMs for hylafax and libgr

[Ramana Juvvadi <juvvadi@lekha.org>]

Since the last announcement, I have gone through some more builds.
The results can be dowloaded from

	ftp://ftp.lekha.org/pub
	http://www.lekha.org/hyalfax


Hylafax rpm has advanced to release 4 now, whereas libgr has advanced
to release 2. 

I'll follow up with a mail on some of the  the questions that were raised.

I sent the following announcement to comp.os.linux.announce and I put
the rpms in the incoming directory of ftp.redhat.com

-------------------------------------------------------------------


What is hylafax ?
-----------------

Hylafax is a package for sending and receiving faxes. Hylafax is an 
enterprise soln. It can spool the outgoing and incoming faxes on
a central server. The client can be either on a unix or a Windows platform.


About the RPM of the hylafax
-----------------------------

For the impatient, the URLs sre

	http://www.lekha.org/hylafax
	ftp://ftp.lekha.org/pub


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. The only thing you to
do after the installing the RPM is to edit a config.modem file to suit
the parameters of your modem.


There is already a linux binary at SGI's site. An rpm for hylafax was
built using this binary by Matthew Rice before.  Some of you who tried
to install the rpm might have experienced problems running
'faxsetup'. This is because the rpm doesn't have all the files.  Also,
it doesn't set up the package for you.  After encouragement from
Matthew, I decided to build a new rpm of hylafax from the source.

The features of the new rpm are: 

   1.	Redhat Linux 4.2 comes with libgr-2.0.9. However, the libtiff
	that comes in libgr-2.0.9 is older than the version required by
	hylafax. Meanwhile libgr has evolved and the latest version is
	libgr-2.0.13. However,libgr-2.0.13 has some shell scripts missing. I
	added them to make it libgr-2.0.14.

   2.	libgr-2.0.14 subsumes the functionality of another package 
	that comes with Redhat 4.2, netpbm-1mar1994. 

   3.	It comes with rpms of the sources of hylafax and libgr. 

   4.   It comes with an automatic install at the time of 'rpm -i'
	and uninstall at the time of 'rpm -e'. 

   5. 	It includes scripts /etc/rc.d for automatic startup at boot time.

   6.   It includes symbolic links to ghostscript afm files for 
	conversion from ascii to postscript 
	
   7.	It uses /usr instead of /usr/local in the tradition of rpm 

   8.	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 

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

   10.	There is an executable called xferstats in hylafax clashing with 
	an xferstats from wu-ftpd. Hence its name is changed to 
	xfersfaxtats. Similarly xferlog is changed to  xferfaxlog. 


	http://www.lekha.org/hylafax
	ftp://ftp.lekha.org/pub