Re: flexfax: Announcement: RPMs for hylafax and libgr

[Matthias.Apitz@SOFTCON.de]

Ramana Juvvadi wrote:
    
    
    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

[ BTW: It's a good idea to send also the MD5 checksums for your
binary distribution so that folks can check what they transfered. ]
    
Thanks for your work and don't get my comments below wrong.

HylaFAX (please note the spelling of the name) is a free
software project and everyone is free to do whatever he/she
wants to do with it. It is supported by folks of this list and
by the keepers of binary distributions (you're now one of
them). It's difficult for us to help other people out if
they don't use the tools (or don't have these tools in their
binary distribution), e.g. faxsetup(1M) or faxaddmodem(1M),
or even if the man pages which are part of the source distribution
don't match the names of executables (don't know if you changed
also all man and HTML pages for the changed name(s) of commands).

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

The current version of HylaFAX is v4.0pl1. It would be good if
the RPM binary would have the same name in it and (if needed)
some additional version information added. It should be clear
that the distributed binaries are compiled from v4.0pl1 (we're
moving to v4.0pl2 sometimes).
    
    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.

There are also clients for Mac's.
    
    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.

Binary distributions are a good thing. This allow folks without
the tools to compile and build from source (e.g. gcc compiler)
and without the appropriate knowlege to make use of this software.

The HylaFAX source and all other binary distributions come with
a lot of tools to make the configuration part of the installation
as easy as possible. These tools (e.g. faxsetup(1M)) check your
system and (not only but also) the installed HylaFAX software
for "is it ready to use?". They let you create needed files or information
(e.g. entries in /etc/services) and so on. faxaddmodem(1M)
will *test* your modem and try to find and build a config file 
for it. A modem which causes problems during faxaddmodem(1M)
will perhaps not work together with HylaFAX. Creating modem
config files by hand is possible but needs much more experience
with HylaFAX and the modems as one needs for using faxaddmodem(1M).

May be you don't get my points. But we will all see these
questions in the mailing list in the future like this one
just arriving:

> To: flexfax@sgi.com
> Subject: flexfax: Newest build give this error...
> 
> I installed the latest hylafax RPM.  How do I specify the modem?
                                       ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> I re-booted.
> I tried to use the command sendfax and got this error:

	....
    
    
    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,
                ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

This is definitely not a good idea, I think, sorry.

	matthias

    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: 
    
	....