Philipp Thomas wrote:
* David C. Rankin (drankinatty@suddenlinkmail.com) [20090904 14:45]:
I'll work on packaging it. How hard can it be? It's just a web app and only requires modifications 3 files in /var/spool/hylafax/...
I've taken a (a bit cursory) look at avantfax myself and I'd say it needs some *major* work:
1) There is no place you could possibly move the whole avantfax directory. Simply moving it to something like /var/www is impossible! It looks like several directories are needed, some of them below /usr/lib, others below /var/lib and /var/cache and so on. *Then* you need to adapt the php scripts to the changed paths.
2) Replacing files from hylafax with symlinks to avantfax replacements is a no-go for rpm packages. The name of the scripts to call must be made configurable *in Hylafax*.
3) Having a sudoers entry for HTTPDUSER that includes /sbin/reboot and /sbin/halt will earn you some discussion with our security folks.
4) You can't simply start all services you need from an rpm package. IMNSHO the only clean solution would be an init script that depends on all services that avantfax needs but otherwise does nothing more than report status.
5) As we don't have any means for interactive installation a rather extensive README needs to be written that explains the user what and how to configure.
I hope SuSE will see fit to use var/spool/hylafax instead of using a /custom directory and being out of sync with the rest of the Linux /community.
Hylafax currently needs a new maintainer, which can be anyone from the community. This maintainer could change the default to /var/spool/hylafax , though he would have to regard the update path.
Philipp
Does this new hylafax have the -j option to sendfax and the event trigger script ( /var/spool/hylafax/etc/FaxAccounting, intended for accounting but also proivides the perfect place to insert any kind of database or application integration you want) from HylaFAX+ ? The problem with the 'official' hylafax is that the maintainers, ifax, sell db integration as a commercial enhancement, and so they are dismotivated to provide such features in hylafax for free. But hylafax+ has them. I was maintaining hylafax+ myself for a while but I found that someone else is already maintaining a nice package in OBS and it's been working fine. ifax and the regular hylafax web site tries to discredit hylafax+ as an inferior (or at least pointless) offshoot, but, until these features or something of equivalent or better functionality are in hylafax, I won't use it. Can't actually. I need to be able to associate individual fax jobs with various records in my application, and I need to be able to have the application look up the current status of any fax job. Not all jobs are submitted in such a way that the app can collect a fax reqeast number from sendfax at submit time and track the job that way, but they can attach metadata about the job to the fax, which the app can then look for later. VSI-FAX has that as a built in feature since decades ago, yet hylafax still doesn't have it. But I can emulate one of vsi-fax's features with the -j option in hylafax+'s sendfax. Which is, -j allows you to supply a free form comment with a fax request, and that comment gets saved along with the rest of the fax job details, and can be included in the faxstat output, and so, you can embed special strings in -j and then search for them in sendfax. This sorta-kinda-good-enough emulates the feature of "user tags" in vsifax where you can submit arbitrary extra info with a fax job, and it goes into it's own extra field in vsifax's back end database, and then you can use those fields to search for fax jobs later efficiently. By asking for all of the faxes submitted by company-z, or all of the faxes associated with invoice-#n, etc.. The FaxAccounting script is essentially the same as another key integration feature of vsi-fax which they call event-notification-procedure scripts. Basically shell scripts that you can put whatever you want in them, and they run any time the status of any fax changes. So you use them to update external databases, send emails print things etc.. whatever weird thing you want that there isn't already a built-in function for. Vsi-fax has a bunch of different scripts that will run under different conditions or for different phases of a fax job, and FaxAccounting is basically a single script that runs at a few of the main points in the life of a fax job, so it's simpler than vsifax, but it's still perfectly fine. And, our fax server, which receives and sends tons of faxes a day 24/7 via a full T1 fax board installed right in the box as well as a varying number of regular modems on pots lines, and receiving outgoing fax jobs from 20 or so remote application servers, has been chugging just fine without a blip running hylafax+ for years, so, stability/performance/reliability are no concern that I can see. http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home://aljex/openSUSE_11.1/x86_64/... which really comes from here: https://build.opensuse.org/package/show?package=hylafax-plus&project=home:DocB -- bkw -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org