Re: patches (was: Re: flexfax: hfaxd exits)

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

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

On Sun, 22 Feb 1998 Matthias.Apitz@SOFTCON.de wrote:

> To: Nico Garcia <raoul@cirl.meei.harvard.edu>

> Nico Garcia wrote:
>     
>     > Anyway, my problem is that on my new RedHat 5.0 system hfaxd
>     > exists as soon as I start it. In /var/log/messages I find
>     > the following message:
>     
>     
>     I've got a stack of patches for RedHat 5.0 Linux: Matthew has been
>     graciously putting them up at the FTP site, and the originals are at
>     http://cirl.meei.harvard.edu/~raoul/patches/
> 
> 	....
> 
> Am I Matthew? :-)) Don't know but anyway....

Typo. Sorry about that, I've also been corresponding about HylaFAX
with a Linux maintainer named Matthew.

> 
> Just to clarify the above mesaage a bit and also some other notes
> about the ftp-servers and the patch policy at all:
> 
> At the moment I don't host the above mentioned patches in a
> public area. The reason for this is that about some of
> the patches Nico and I (and perhaps some others too) disagree;
> and two or three of these patches will be in a future pl3 or must
> be still verified on other systems at least.

Again, my mistake. 

> In generally my policy is to keep *one* official HylaFAX version
> and patches between these official versions should only be placed
> in a public area if there are emergency problems to be fixed (like
> the UCP problem). All other patches should be collected, tested and
> made public in the next official version. The only reason for that
> policy is to make it possible to track down problems that
> others have. Imagine one sends a message to the list: "I applied
> patch1, patch3 and patch7 of someone else and now it is
> broken -- please help me." This isn't the way a good support
> can be work.

>     The published RPM for this had a number of things I agree with (such
>     as renaming xferstats to xferfaxstats to avoid conflicts with the
>     wu-ftpd configuration). It also had some incorrect or fairly careless
>     things, such as naming the boot scripts "S80fax" instead of something
>     like "S80hylafax", and requiring ghostscript fonts of at least
>     version 5.10 when those are *identical* to the version 4.xx fonts.
> 
> Yes, this is also a good example for the reason of my policy
> I explained above.

>     I am not running into this problem under RedHat 5.0. Perhaps you have a
>     previous copy of hfaxd running, a remnant of a previous installation?
> 
> No. The strace(1) output shows clearly, that the fd 0 (stdin)
> is not a socket fd and the reason for that is explained in the
> man page of hfaxd(1M).

And Matthias seems to be absolutely right about this problem, and he
has also shown another difficulty with the current documentation.
Under RedHat Linux, the hfaxd manpage is hfaxd(8C), due to the
different structures of the manpage directories under different
operating systems.

This reminds me. Would it more make sense to write into the HTML
documentation a correction for these, or just to delete all the
suffixes from the man page references? There is only man page,
the HylaFAX(1) and HylaFAX(5) for client and server applications,
that would be confusing if those references were all deleted.

Opinions?

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

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: 2.6.2

iQCVAwUBNPEGkD/+ItycgIJRAQFYxQP6Apuwrbl4h+On0Km/LHsP0qnqg9QZilDF
YuzDmTgiOhNjMMgAiGhzvgQfQyDitXmQmrTc0xiUj9NNjWYo4lCZ3dFYLhBwHo8a
H4Bf1Fj6acdv4UMg6XBRSVqm2g5UBMVarfFzmhwZJBWj9aChyfcl721tLDMD8X/F
iBiM+xVtvRw=
=VpLf
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----