Try before you buy

I’ve spent some time today getting Sendmail+DTrace to install properly.

This wasn’t quite as straightforward as it could be, requiring a little build infrastructure hacking.

The general stanza to build and install Sendmail after extracing the source code is:

% sh Build
% make install

This will overwrite your existing Sendmail installation. That’s not what I want. For the time being I want Sendmail to install itself somewhere different so that the base Sendmail configuration is not changed.

The Sendmail build system supports a DESTDIR variable. Set that, and it’s (in theory) prepended to all the paths that are created/installed. I ran in to one small problem with this.

The install infrastructure creates various links in $DESTDIR/usr/bin. And a bug meant that $DESTDIR was not being prepended to the link source. This meant that if I did this:

% sh Build
% make DESTDIR=$HOME/sendmail install

I’d see this:

% cd $HOME/sendmail/usr/bin
% ls -l # Some columns elided from output
total 408
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root  root  hoststat -> /usr/lib/sendmail*
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root  root  mailq -> /usr/lib/sendmail*
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root  root  newaliases -> /usr/lib/sendmail*
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root  root  purgestat -> /usr/lib/sendmail*
-r-xr-xr-x  1 bin   bin   vacation*

That’s no good — those links all point to the system copy of Sendmail. Change 1060 fixes this in the build infrastructure, creating the links correctly. The result is this:

% cd $HOME/sendmail/usr/bin
% ls -l # Some columns elided from output
total 408
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root  root  hoststat -> /home/nik/usr/lib/sendmail*
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root  root  mailq -> /home/nik/usr/lib/sendmail*
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root  root  newaliases -> /home/nik/usr/lib/sendmail*
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root  root  purgestat -> /home/nik/usr/lib/sendmail*
-r-xr-xr-x  1 bin   bin   vacation*

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