Installation
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Supported OS ?
Sympa can run on any unix operating system including linux, solaris, mac-os, free-bsd, ... Prerequisite are described in detail in Sympa reference manual.
Why latest version is not availible as binary package ?
Sympa authors does not produce themself binary packages for any system (.rpm, .deb) . The package you can fing from http://www.sympa.org/linux.html are contributions, they is always some delay before a version is availible as binary package.
Should I install a package or use the tar.gz source distrib ?
Sympa installation is known as long job. In fact this not really true : the installation itself is simple (./configure; make; make install) but there is a lot of configuration job in order to plug Sympa with other services : Perl, RDBMS, syslog, sendmail, Apache, ... Later upgrade processus are really fast and simple because all thoses tunning don't need to be modified. As a conclusion : what ever you are using a binary package or a source distrib : installation require good practice with your operating system but using source distribution, you can use the latest Sympa version.
what's the first step for installation ?
Check http://www.sympa.org/distribution/current/INSTALL which is included in the distribution.