dovecot - Mar 2012 - Building Dovecot RHEL RPMs with custom LDAP packages

Hi,

We are (still) mainly using CentOS 5 (5.8 x86_64). As CentOS / RHEL 5 
standard OpenLDAP packages are rather old (2.3.x), we've been using LTB 
OpenLDAP packages (http://ltb-project.org/wiki/download#openldap), which 
get installed in non-standard file system locations.

So, I would like to re-build Dovecot packages based on these OpenLDAP 
libraries, esp. because I see that dovecot RPM packages are built using 
OpenLDAP v2.3 libraries.

I am not much experienced in building RPMs and preparing spec files.

In http://dl.atrpms.net/all/dovecot.spec I see:

------------------------------------------------
BuildRequires: openldap-devel, cyrus-sasl-devel

...

Obsoletes: %{name}-pgsql < %{epoch}:%{version}-%{release}, %{name}-mysql 
< %{epoch}:%{version}-%{release}, %{name}-sqlite < 
%{epoch}:%{version}-%{release}, %{name}-ldap < 
%{epoch}:%{version}-%{release}, $
Conflicts: %{name}-pgsql > %{epoch}:%{version}-%{release}, %{name}-mysql 
 > %{epoch}:%{version}-%{release}, %{name}-sqlite > 
%{epoch}:%{version}-%{release}, %{name}-ldap > 
%{epoch}:%{version}-%{release}, $
------------------------------------------------

So, I can change the former reference (openldap-devel) to:

    openldap-ltb-debuginfo, cyrus-sasl-devel

Question 1: What other changes should we make in order to specify that 
we will be using LDAP libraries from: /usr/local/openldap/lib64 and 
include files from: /usr/local/openldap/include (rather than from 
/usr/lib64 and /usr/include, respectively, which are the standard file 
paths used in openldap-devel)

Question 2: How the Obsoletes and Conflicts lines should be changed?

Question 3: It seems to me (by reading the spec file) that the final 
Dovecot RPM (and the included executables) does not need any LDAP 
dynamic library in order to run with LDAP support (because I don't see 
any dependencies on openldap package). Can somebody please confirm?

Any other associated info would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Nick

On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 01:20:22PM +0200, Nikolaos Milas
wrote:
> We are (still) mainly using CentOS 5 (5.8 x86_64). As CentOS /
> RHEL 5 standard OpenLDAP packages are rather old (2.3.x), we've
> been using LTB OpenLDAP packages 
> (http://ltb-project.org/wiki/download#openldap), which get 
> installed in non-standard file system locations.
ISTM that herein lies the whole problem. Why did you not rpmbuild 
your OpenLDAP? That would have avoided all further fuss.

Another observation I can offer, unwelcome as it may be: your OS 
choice was not a good one when you want the features of recent 
software. Perhaps you should rethink that choice. You have invested 
much effort in this task.
> So, I would like to re-build Dovecot packages based on these 
> OpenLDAP libraries, esp. because I see that dovecot RPM packages 
> are built using OpenLDAP v2.3 libraries.
> 
> I am not much experienced in building RPMs and preparing spec 
> files.
And that is really more a question for a CentOS forum than here.
> In http://dl.atrpms.net/all/dovecot.spec I see:
> 
> ------------------------------------------------
> BuildRequires: openldap-devel, cyrus-sasl-devel
The latter requirement seems curious to me. In what way does Dovecot 
use Cyrus SASL?
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