Update/Package Management Philosophy

[CrypTom]

Hi all

I'm new to zimbra, but I like it very much. I think with zimbra I found what I was looking for: a great email (and more) environment for our school (~150 teachers, ~850 pupils)! I'm using the debian version (I installed 3.1.4)

I have some questions:

• Why does zimbra bring its own version of all the necessary applications (postfix, clamav, amavis, openldap, ...)? Why not using the distributor's versions?
• Is this just the case for the debian version? Is it handled differently when using rpms?
• I'm not feeling very comfortable with this situation. How are security updates handled? When a security fix for e.g. postfix is released, will there be a new zimbra release or does it automatically update postfix (I dont think so)...
• I need to run other websites (on apache) on the same server (our financial resources are limited... we are a federal school), but I cant run apache (or zimbra) on a different port because of the firewall (managed by our provider, just a few open ports, all used). So it would be much easier if zimbra would depend on the distributor's packages.

Thanks for your great work.

Cheers
CrypTom

[ringnebula]

All of your questions have been answered numerous times here on the forums, especially the one about bundling mysql, postfix, etc.....

As for your apache problem, if you have more than one IP on your server you can bind each instance to it's own IP. Check out http://wiki.zimbra.com for details on that and other configuration options.