Kolab on top of a minimal installation

[Thomas Lotterer]

Aurelien,

On Thu, Apr 08, 2004, Aurelien Marchand wrote:

> I was wondering if it would be a good idea to install Kolab on the a 
> machine who has the least amount of program installed on it. [...]
> When I tried to install Kolab. using the source .tar from zfos.org, I 
> realised it needed both gcc and gcc-c++ packages.
> 
What else should you expect when installing from source? Building from
source requires build tools like a compiler. But the question is valid.
If the machine is dedicated to a single task it is usually a good idea
to get rid of all unnecessary components as they might weaken security,
increase update workload and add to complexity making troubleshooting
harder.

When you install on a BSD system the compiler and other development
tools are part of the OS so they are always available. If you prefer
Linux my impression is it depends on the strategy of he distro. I would
place Debian and Gentoo into the "prefer sources" area and place RedHat
and SuSE into "prefer binaries" area. That doesn't mean you are forced
to the preference. I dunno where to place Mandrake and others. Things
become worse if you go commercial and use Solaris or UnixWare where
development tools actually come at an additonal cost. In all cases, if
you decided or are forced to omit development tools you have to install
binaries. Take the ones readily available for download or build them on
another suitable machine under your control. If you do not want to or
cannot use the vendor development tools and still want to build from
source there is a hybrid soluion availabe: download binaries for the
deveopment tools namely the OpenPKG bootstrap, make, binutils and gcc.
Then restart from source using these tools to rebuild themselves and the
remainder of packages.

Pick one
a) vendor-dev.bin + kolab.src
b) kolab.bin
c) kolab-dev.bin + kolab.src

Please note that the ZfOS downloads always contain the development
tools, even if you download binaries only which do not require these
tools. The reason is to allow rebuilding of existing, additional and
updated (bingo: security) packages no matter if you started from source
or binary.

--
Thomas.Lotterer at cw.com, Cable & Wireless