Mads Kiilerich wrote:
Marco Hess wrote, On 04/03/2008 12:47 AM:I am on version 1.12. I have installed it on SME Server (see contribs.org) which is CentOS 4.5 based and also runs all the other services in my office like file server, email, website, subversion, Trac for my software development projects. At the time I was able to install LSMB with just a few extra rpm based perl packages.For 1.2.11 that was changed with the reason that "Extra perl packages are now available in rpmforge". AFAICS that isn't documented anywhere. Rpmforge is rpmforge.net, which now is about to merge with rpmrepo.org. (FWIW I preferred the old approach as I don't like to depend on externel repositories.)Since 1.12 however, the devs have pulled in a number of perl libraries that apparently are not that common and I have been unable to find the corresponding updated rpms for these libraries for CentOS4 or Redhat Enterprise Linux 4. I got a fair way but in the end was unable to resolve some final dependencies and I gave up.
I concur. If you configure a Linux box for work purposes, adding external repositories may be a security risk. For example; any packages installed from an external repository will break tools such as rkhunter and chkrootkit which check system binaries against a database of checksums specifically for the core repository. So when they flag a file as having an incorrect checksum, you then need to see if it's from an external repository or if it has indeed been replaced by a malicious binary.
Also I have noticed that the non core repositories will provide randomly upgraded packages that then can break future upgrades due to circular dependencies and other packager eccentricities.
I have had no major issues installing LedgerSMB on Ubuntu 8.04. However using the perl shell to install extra modules can be tricky. So I have great sympathy for anyone that wishes to use a simple yum install ledgersmb.
I presume that those extra Perl modules are offering a lot more functionality for the ledgersmb devs to build a richer application with cleaner code. So the tradeoff is a more difficult install the effects of which can be mitigated by more comprehensive documentation.