flexfax: Re: RPM: document conversion script was not found

[Sam Leffler <sam@hyla.chez.sgi.com>]

    To:  Steve Williams <steve@genie96.com>
    Subject:  Re: RPM: document conversion script was not found
    Cc:  edw@detel.com, flexfax@sgi.com
    Date: Thu, 23 Oct 1997 19:05:12 EDT
    From:  Ramana Juvvadi <juvvadi@lekha.org>

    Steve Williams writes:
    
     > called ps2fax, that should fire up ghostscript.  Either it's missing,
     > or what it is doing is wrong.  Try to run this program by hand.  There 
is
     > a man page ( I believe ) for ps2fax ( NOTE I believe you have to be in 
the
     > $FAXSPOOL directory when you run ps2fax )
    
    Actually, this was an error in my rpm. I should have included
    a symbolic link ps2fax --> ps2fax.gs in /var/spool/hyla/bin.
    I will fix it in the next release of the rpm.

The right solution (as I told you in direct email) is to use the faxsetup
script to do work such as configuring the symbolic link to the appropriate
ps2fax script.  Not only does faxsetup install this link but it also verifies
that the PSRIP is installed on the target machine and that the RIP is
properly configured (e.g. that Ghostscript has the necessary driver).

FWIW my binary distribution for IRIX that is at least as complete as
anything you are going to do requires that faxsetup be run to complete
an installation.
    
    The ModemClass: 2 was also introduced by me in the rpm. It will be
    removed in the next release. As a clueless user I typed 2 when 
    faxsetup asked for ModemClass. Basically I copied the config
    file faxsetup generated for me. 
    
    I have no complaints about faxsetup. However, the information
    that  faxsetup probes and finds out doesn't vary across
    Readhat Linux systems. It is the information that faxaddmodem
    is trying to find out that is likely to vary from 
    machine to machine. Unfortuantely, that is the information
    that is most difficult to find out by probing. I don't
    mean to complain about the program as such. I just think
    that it is difficult for any program to assure that
    probing a modem works reliably. I don't see how
    a programmer can test his program on hundreds of 
    models. 
    
faxsetup and faxaddmodem are designed to do many things to insure a
system is properly setup for operation.  While you may think that
faxsetup always does the same thing across your systems I believe that
you are wrong (consider above how faxsetup verifies that gs is built
and installed such that it supports HylaFAX's needs).  Further by not
simply invoking faxsetup to do it's thing you are missing out any future
improvements that might be made in this script.  Likewise for faxaddmodem.
The issue of faxsetup and/or faxaddmodem not working right for your system
is orthogonal to whether or not you should use it in your binary distribution.
Users will want (and need) to be able to run these scripts at times after
they've installed the software from the RPM so if they don't work then
need to do is fix 'em, not avoid them.

        Sam