[csw-maintainers] advice on custom manifests

[Ben Walton]

Hi All,

I'm looking at the exim package and want to improve it so that it can
be installed without user prompts and also to fix a few other warts.

The user prompts all surround the replacement of the system binaries
such as sendmail and mailq.  For the sendmail replacement, putting a
service dependency on sendmail-client is sufficient to avoid any need
to replace the binary.

So the question is: Is there a best practice that we're using when we
ship a custom manifest or should I just take the auto-generated one
and add the extra dependency?

My plan for replacing mailq is to write a little wrapper script and
setup an alternative handler so that it can play nice with Peter's
sendmail and Juraj's postfix if they want to ship those too.  It would
rely on PATH for precedence over the system version, but I think
that's way nicer than moving the system version out of the way and I
sort of expect that people would have /opt/csw/bin high in precedence
anyway.  (I'm definitely open to better solutions though if someone
has one.)

Thanks
-Ben
--
Ben Walton
Systems Programmer - CHASS
University of Toronto
C:416.407.5610 | W:416.978.4302