THE EXIM MAIL TRANSFER AGENT
----------------------------

Copyright (c) 1996 University of Cambridge.
See the file NOTICE for conditions of use and distribution.

There is a mailing list for Exim whose address is exim-users@lists.cam.ac.uk; 
requests to be added should be sent to exim-users-request@lists.cam.ac.uk.


EXIM DISTRIBUTION
-----------------

Unpacking the tar file should produce a single directory called exim-<version>, 
containing the following files and directories:

LICENCE        the GNU General Public Licence
Makefile       top level Makefile
OS/            directory containing OS-specific files
NOTICE         notice about conditions of use
README         this file
doc/           directory of documentation files
exim_monitor/  directory of source files for the Exim monitor
regexp/        directory of source files for regular expression routines
scripts/       directory of scripts used in the build process
src/           directory of source files
util/          directory of independent utilities

Please see the documentation files for full instructions on how to build,
install, and run Exim. For straightforward installations the building process
is as follows:

. Edit the file called src/EDITME and put the result in a file called 
  Local/Makefile. There are comments in src/EDITME telling you what the
  various parameters are. You must at least provide values for CONFIGURE_FILE,
  BIN_DIRECTORY, and SPOOL_DIRECTORY. Other parameters can be defaulted, though 
  it is recommended you set up a uid and gid for Exim and declare their values
  in EXIM_USER and EXIM_GROUP.  
  
. If you are going to compile the Exim monitor, edit the file called 
  exim_monitor/EDITME and put the result in a file called Local/eximon.conf.
  If you are not going to compile the Exim monitor, you should have commented
  out the line starting EXIM_MONITOR= when creating Local/Makefile. There are 
  comments in exim_monitor/EDITME about the values set therein, but in this 
  case everything can be defaulted if you wish. 
  
. Type "make". This will determine what your machine's architecture and 
  operating system are, and create a build directory from those names (e.g. 
  "build-Sunos5-sparc"). Symbolic links are created from the build directory 
  to the source directory. A configured make file called <build-dir>/makefile 
  is then created, and you are asked to run make again.
  
. Type "make" again. This time various binaries and scripts are built
  inside the build directory.
  
. Type "make install", while running as root, to install the binaries,
  scripts, and a default configuration file. To see what this command is
  going to do before risking it, run "../scripts/exim_install -n" (not as 
  root) from within the build directory. 
  
. The default configuration file will use your host's fully qualified name (as 
  obtained from the uname() function) as the only local mail domain and as the 
  domain which is used to qualify unqualified local mail addresses. See the 
  comments in the default configuration file if you want to change these. 
  
The operating systems currently supported are: BSDI, FreeBSD, HP-UX, IRIX,
Linux, NetBSD, OSF1, SunOS4, SunOS5, and Ultrix.

******* IMPORTANT FOR LINUX USERS *******

Exim makes use of the fcntl() system call to effect file locking. It uses this 
for its databases of "hints", which are kept as DBM files. Some releases of 
Linux come with DBM functions that do their own locking, unlike the versions in 
other systems, which leave all file locking up to the application. This would
not be a disaster, except that the obsolescent flock() locking function is
used, and Linux objects to a mixture of flock() and fcntl() locking on the same
file.

Others who know more about these things than I support the view that, as 
flock() is obsolescent, Exim should not be bent to accommodate it just for this 
reason. The way out of the problem is to install a DBM library that does not 
suffer from this problem. One that is in widespread use is the "db" library
from Berkeley, that can be obtained by anonymous ftp from

  ftp.cs.berkeley.edu 

in one of the files ucb/4bsd/db.tar.Z or ucb/4bsd/db.tar.gz. By default, Exim 
will use the ndbm compatibility function interface to this library, but it can 
be configured to use the native calls by setting USE_DB in an appropriate 
configuration file.

Philip Hazel <ph10@cus.cam.ac.uk>
