What? A Luddite for Majordomo? Yes.
System Adminstrators can be divided into the white-hot geniuses and the rest of us that just want to go home at the end of the day and have an uninterrupted weekend. Or, as they say in aviation, there are bold pilots and there are old pilots, there are no old bold pilots.
One of the top two or three requirements for a software package to me has to do with quick, clean, little-or-no-impact-to-the-users upgrades. Better yet if they are infrequent. Number 2, I like monolithic packages. One executable to roll into place...or back out if things go bad.
I'm not big on messy, super-hero upgrades with 3000+ users who don't pay any attention to your warnings to stay the *&^% away from software X for Y hours...and a college is a 25x8x367 environment. Heartburn, migraines and pressure, oh my!
I was interested in Mailman too, until I saw that upgrading would be frequent, include Apache and Python (combinatorial problemation), and was done by untaring and building in place, thus destroying the previous constellation of whirling bits. This is hope as an upgrade success plan.
Now, I'm no genius and will freely admit it, but /if/ the MM crowd wants acceptance in the heavy duty commercial arena, the name of the games is /NOT/ just functionality...it has to include maintainability and serviceability...which to me, MM ignore. 'Course I got huffily weeweed all over when I tried to raise that issue on the MM list. And they said I should get binaries from Linux...but the binaries aren't available for my *nix and even if they were, they prolly wouldn't have much in the way of support.
People will probably weewee over me here, too. But.......
Majordomo is very stable (a release every year, laughably infrequent), perl that it needs is part of my *nix image and very well supported by
my *nix's vendor, and there's relatively few pieces...I can build MD elsewhere and bring it in.
OK, I've got on my Nomex raincoat. Let fly.........
-- ==== Stewart Dean, Unix System Admin, Henderson Computer Resources Center of Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York 12504 [EMAIL PROTECTED] voice: 845-758-7475, fax: 845-758-7035
