At some point in time, a version of Postfix was supported on:
AIX 3.2.5, 4.1.x, 4.2.0, 4.3.x, 5.2
BSD/OS 2.x, 3.x, 4.x
Darwin 1.x
FreeBSD 2.x, 3.x, 4.x, 5.x
HP-UX 9.x, 10.x, 11.x
IRIX 5.x, 6.x
Linux Debian 1.3.1, 2.x, 3.x
Linux RedHat 3.x (January 2004) - 9.x
Linux Slackware 3.x, 4.x, 7.x
Linux SuSE 5.x, 6.x, 7.x
Mac OS X
NEXTSTEP 3.x
NetBSD 1.x
OPENSTEP 4.x
OSF1.V3 - OSF1.V5 (Digital UNIX)
Reliant UNIX 5.x
Rhapsody 5.x
SunOS 4.1.4 (July 2006)
SunOS 5.4 - 5.9 (Solaris 2.4..9)
Ultrix 4.x (well, that was long ago)
or something closely resemblant.
4.1 - Getting started
On Solaris, the "make" command and other utilities for software
development are in /usr/ccs/bin, so you MUST have /usr/ccs/bin in
your command search path.
If you need to build Postfix for multiple architectures, use the
"lndir" command to build a shadow tree with symbolic links to the
source files. "lndir" is part of X11R6.
If at any time in the build process you get messages like: "make:
don't know how to ..." you should be able to recover by running
the following command from the Postfix top-level directory:
% make -f Makefile.init makefiles
If you copied the Postfix source code after building it on another
machine, it is a good idea to cd into the top-level directory and
first do this:
% make tidy
This will get rid of any system dependencies left over from
compiling the software elsewhere.
4.2 - What compiler to use
To build with GCC, or with the native compiler if people told me
that is better for your system, just cd into the top-level Postfix
directory of the source tree and type:
% make
To build with a non-default compiler, you need to specify the name
of the compiler. Here are a few examples:
% make makefiles CC=/opt/SUNWspro/bin/cc (Solaris)
% make
% make makefiles CC="/opt/ansic/bin/cc -Ae" (HP-UX)
% make
% make makefiles CC="purify cc"
% make
and so on. In some cases, optimization is turned off automatically.
4.3 - Building with optional extensions
By default, Postfix builds as a mail system with relatively few
bells and whistles. Support for third-party databases etc.
must be configured when Postfix is compiled. The following documents describe how to build Postfix with support for extensions:
Note: IP version 6 support is compiled into Postfix on operating
systems that have IPv6 support. See the
IPV6_README file for details.
4.4 - Overriding built-in parameter default settings
All Postfix configuration parameters can be changed by editing
a Postfix configuration file, except for one: the parameter that
specifies the location of Postfix configuration files. In order to
build Postfix with a configuration directory other than /etc/postfix,
use:
% make makefiles CCARGS='-DDEF_CONFIG_DIR=\"/some/where\"'
% make
IMPORTANT: Be sure to get the quotes right. These details matter
a lot.
Parameters whose defaults can be specified in this way are:
4.5 - Support for thousands of processes
In order to build Postfix for very large applications, where you
expect to run more than 1000 mail delivery processes, you may need to
override the definition of the FD_SETSIZE macro to make select()
work correctly:
% make makefiles CCARGS=-DFD_SETSIZE=2048
Warning: the above has no effect on some Linux versions.
Apparently, on these systems the FD_SETSIZE value can be changed
only by using undocumented interfaces. Currently, that means
including <bits/types.h> directly (which is not allowed) and
overriding the __FD_SETSIZE macro. Beware, undocumented interfaces
can change at any time and without warning.
4.6 - Compiling Postfix, at last
If the command
% make
is successful, then you can proceed to
install
Postfix (section 6).
If the command produces compiler error messages, it may be time
to search the web or to ask the [email protected] mailing
list, but be sure to search the mailing list archives first. Some
mailing list archives are linked from
https://www.postfix.org/.
