Courier from ports without FAM? or securing FAM.

[Brian Candler]

On Sun, Oct 16, 2005 at 01:34:56AM -0400, Francisco Reyes wrote:
> Got courier working, however it keeps getting built with FAM even though I 
> told the port not to use it.
> 
> Looking at the makefile I saw
> .if defined(WITH_FAM) || exists(${LOCALBASE}/lib/libfam.so)
> CONFIGURE_ENV= CPPFLAGS="-I${LOCALBASE}/include" \
>                LDFLAGS="${LDFLAGS}"
> LDFLAGS+=      -L${LOCALBASE}/lib
> LIB_DEPENDS+=  fam.0:${PORTSDIR}/devel/fam
> .endif
> 
> So I commented them all out.. still built with FAM. :-(

It will, unless the port people heavily patched courier's configure system.
It automatically looks for fam and uses it, and there's no --disable-fam
option. I keep asking for this, but MrSam keeps rejecting it. He seems to
think FAM is a good idea (despite the number of people who are broken by bad
FAM installs)

> Unforntunately I had FAM already installed and it seems the port compiles 
> against it if present.. even after commenting the lines above.

Yep. You need to pkg_delete fam before building courier; you can reinstall
it afterwards.

> Anyone familiar with Courier could comment on how usefull is FAM for 
> users? Is it worth the trouble/security risk?

I've always built on a clean system without FAM, and it works fine; however
the vast majority of the userbase was POP3 with only a handful of IMAP
users.

FAM is only used for IMAP and is supposed to make the IMAP IDLE command more
efficient / faster to respond to incoming mail.

Regards,

Brian.