[Chapter 2] Have a V8
Author: Bryan Costales & Eric Allman
Date: 1999-01-06T18:32:24Z

#

| Chapter 2 |

# 2. Have a V8

Contents:
Get the Source
Read the Documents
What's What in src
Preliminaries
Build
Test It
Things to Try

To make the examples on your screen match those in this book, we have elected to use V8 sendmail for the rest of this tutorial. If you are already running the latest release of V8 sendmail, you may skip this chapter. [1] Otherwise, you will need to get and compile V8. In this chapter we show you how to do just that. But don't worry. We don't intend to show you how to do a full installation. All you need is a runnable sendmail binary, and compiling one is generally pretty easy.

> [1] You may still have to get the latest release and compare it to your system version to find out whether you really have the latest release.

## 2.1 Get the Source

V8 sendmail is officially available via anonymous FTP from:

> ftp://ftp.sendmail.org/ucb/sendmail/

Its distribution consists of two forms of tar(1) files, one compacted with compress(1) and the other with gzip(1):

>     sendmail.*.tar.Z         compressed source tar
>     sendmail.*.tar.gz        gzipped source tar

The `*` in each of the above represents the current version number, such as 8.x.y, where x denotes a major release and y denotes a minor release. Get only one of these two files; they contain identical copies of the distribution. The `.gz` form is smaller and quicker to transfer with FTP.

After you get the source distribution, you next need to unpack it. Assuming the current version is 8.8.4, you unpack it with one of these commands:

>     % zcat sendmail.8.8.4.tar.Z | tar xf -
>     % gzcat sendmail.8.8.4.tar.gz | tar xf -

Once successfully unpacked, you'll find a new subdirectory in the current directory. It has the same name as the source distribution, but with the `.tar.Z` or `.tar.gz` suffix removed and the first dot in the name turned into a hyphen:

>     % ls
>     sendmail.8.8.4.tar.gz    sendmail-8.8.4

Here, sendmail-8.8.4 is the directory that contains the source and documentation for sendmail. Change into that directory and look at its contents:

>     % cd sendmail-8.8.4
>     % ls
>     FAQ             RELEASE_NOTES   mail.local      rmail
>     KNOWNBUGS       cf              mailstats       smrsh
>     Makefile        contrib         makemap         src
>     READ_ME         doc             praliases       test

1.8 Things to Try |  | 2.2 Read the Documents