Vicious Circle of Package Dependencies

[Jason Dixon]

On Aug 10, 2004, at 2:00 PM, Ted Beaton wrote:

> I have been trying to install first Cyrus IMAP and then Courier IMAP 
> and I keep getting tied up in package dependencies.  Some piece I'm 
> installing will require a newer version of a package already on my 
> machine.  I search and find the newer version and try to install it 
> and then there will be 6 or 7 other packages that are dependent on the 
> older version so I need to upgrade them and it goes on and on.  I find 
> myself in a geometrically expanding vicious circle.  I'm sure I'm 
> overlooking something obvious here.  Maybe I shouldn't be trying to 
> install on RedHat 9, maybe I'm leaving something out when I install 
> RedHat 9.  Is there any manageable way to know all of what I need and 
> what all the dependencies are for them at the outset?  Sometimes I 
> can't even find a version of a package required for RedHat 9.  I could 
> force a package to install but I have no idea what problems that may 
> cause later on.  The overall goal is to get the courier-0.46.tar.bz2 
> tar ball to build and install.

Courier-IMAP is one of the easiest installations I've ever performed 
(of mailserver software).  I think your problem is that you're trying 
to install the entire Courier project, rather than just the 
Courier-IMAP subproject.

http://www.courier-mta.org/imap/

Here is how to install Courier-IMAP on a Red Hat system.  You don't 
have to use the user "jason" to build, but it must be a non-root user.

useradd jason
passwd jason
su jason
cd mkdir $HOME/rpm
mkdir $HOME/rpm/SOURCES
mkdir $HOME/rpm/SPECS
mkdir $HOME/rpm/BUILD
mkdir $HOME/rpm/SRPMS
mkdir $HOME/rpm/RPMS
mkdir $HOME/rpm/RPMS/i386
echo "%_topdir    $HOME/rpm" >> $HOME/.rpmmacros
rpmbuild -ta courier-imap-3.0.7.tar.bz2
sudo rpm -ivh /home/jason/rpm/RPMS/i386/courier*rpm

HTH.

--
Jason Dixon, RHCE
DixonGroup Consulting
http://www.dixongroup.net