Hi Kelly,
> Yum shows me that there is a current version available for download, but
> it looks like it wants to upgrade several other aspects of perl, etc.
>
> It's still pretty hard for me to get past the cobalt 'what am I going to
> break when I update this' shakes!
>
> Can I just 'yum install spamassassin' and NOT have it break anything?
Yeah, that's no biggy. When I ported my AV-SPAM to BlueQuartz I had two
choices:
a) The Cobalt way:
Install a separate and modern Perl with all modules for MailScanner &
SpamAssassin. Then install MailScanner and SpamAssassin on top of that. Clean
install, breaks nothing, can be easily uninstalled. Downside: The extra Perl
takes quite some disk space.
b) The BlueQuartz way:
yum install mailscanner
yum install spamassassin
That will install both MailScanner and SpamAssassin with all their
dependencies, like missing Perl modules. Also, it will make sure that
whenever a new version comes out (SpamAssassin-3.1.0 is lurking around the
corner these days), then the upgrade through YUM should be seamless and
painless.
However, there were a few let downs that I discovered:
1.) The SpamAssassin installed through YUM has no DCC and no Razor support and
in fact they aren't available through YUM at all - at this time. Both
*really* increase SpamAssassin's effectiveness tenfold.
2.) YUM has no actual virus scanner listed (unless I'm blind), so you'd still
have to install one manually. Otherwise your MailScanner will just do RBL
checks and block files based on their file extensions.
All in all I opted for a hybrid solution. My AV-SPAM package for BlueQuartz
uses the MailScanner and SpamAssassin which are distributed through YUM, but
extends them with some configurational changes, adds Vipul's Razor and
DCC-support, installs the latest Clam AV and a GUI interface to administer
all aspects of MailScanner & SpamAssassin.
On my development CentOS + BlueQuartz box I installed a lot of extras which I
fetched through YUM and so far I haven't found a single RPM that would break
anything. That's actually quite impressive.
--
With best regards,
Michael Stauber