I just installed, and just as promptly un-installed mailman on Ubuntu server 10.04.4 LTS. The offered pacakge version of mailman for this release, which I used, is 2.1.13-1.
I have a few questions which perhaps someone could answer, if anyone knows the thinking behind Canonical's (and the package maintainer's) motives/reasons for what was done. The most awkward change, for me, is the elimination altogether of the mailman user. Mailman native scripts and utilities apparently get run as root, which as always brings up a whole kettle of security questions. On top of that, I've written a script package to parse and automatically unsubscribe list subscribers based on AOL's "Email feedback reports" for all the lists I host, using, among other things, mailman's python library and the withlist utility. These scripts depend on the existence of a non-privileged Mailman user account with a home dir of /usr/lib/mailman. Yes, I could hack the scripts to make things work, but I'm in the process of a major server move between Linux platforms from different distributions and my time is budgeted. Why was this done? It looks as if I'm going to have to install mailman from source on Ubuntu. I believe the Gentoo download, installed on my older servers, hewed much more closely to the methods and design of the Mailman devs, but I'm wondering what I'm missing here, or if the change was just due to lazy package design on Canonical's part. -- Lindsay Haisley | "Real programmers use butterflies" FMP Computer Services | 512-259-1190 | - xkcd http://www.fmp.com | ------------------------------------------------------ Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org