[csw-maintainers] A couple of sendmail issues

[Peter Bonivart]

On Sat, Apr 7, 2012 at 1:10 AM, Jeffery Small <jeff at cjsa.com> wrote:
> I think the most important change I could suggest is that a section be added
> to the package documentation page which included special notes for upgrading
> between releases.  I realize that there are now special migration files being
> added to the old /opt/csw/{etc,var} locations, and notes are displated as part
> of the install output, but when you are doing a massive upgrade or install,
> these messages are easy to miss and you may have no clue to go looking for
> files in the directory hierarchy.  It would be good to be able to go to the
> package page and read about the significant changes taking place.  In the
> case of this release of Sendmail, this might include a list pointing out:
>
>        * File location migration to /etc/opt/csw/
>        * The specific changes to the ostype and domain configuration files
>            and the need to update the references  in the site .mc file
>        * Brief instructions for rebuilding the sendmail.cf file
>        * Brief instructions for checking & restarting the sendmail service
>            (svcs and svcadm)
>
> Earlier release notes would include:
>
>        * Instructions on deactivating/reactivating the Sun Sendmail using
>            the oracle-sendmail-{de,re}activate.sh scripts
>
> You get the drift.  This would be a common place to go for all packages
> which would give users a heads up on changes and tips on how to address
> problems.  I don't think this would be too hard to implement, as these
> notes could be updated during the development cycle as changes were made,
> and then published at the time a package was pushed out to testing.

Do you mean on our web site? Because what is displayed at the end of
install is in here: /opt/csw/share/doc/sendmail. It doesn't contain
all the things you suggest though, that could be improved. I have also
wanted the package browser on our web site to be able to display notes
from the maintainer, now we use the wiki for that but it hasn't caught
on with either maintainers or users.

> Another tweak that might be a good idea is that pkgutil.conf could have
> an admin email option added.  Then, during an install or upgrade, special
> notifications could be logged to a file and then, at the end of the
> process, have that log emailed to the user.  The log could contain the
> same notes as on the package webpage, or even just a link to the relevant
> pages for the user to review.  This would be another way of making sure the
> important info gets before the user instead of rapidly scrolling off the
> screen during the install/upgrade process.

Today, everything displayed is from the actual packages themselves,
not from pkgutil so that would take some standardized naming or
similar to be able to collect the files.

Is there anything to learn here from other OS:es? How do they handle
it? I remember a couple of years ago when I upgraded RH and they
suddenly had switched to running BIND in chroot, that was a bit of a
surprise I didn't notice until some hours later.

/peter