Lindsay Haisley wrote: >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.
The Ubuntu packages are based on Debian. >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. They don't eliminate the Mailman user. They just call it 'list' rather than 'mailman'. >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. I think 'list' satisfies this. >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? Ask Debian and see the FAQ at <http://wiki.list.org/x/OIDD>. >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. Don't blame Canonical for Debian's decisions. Personally, I would always install from source on Debian/Ubuntu. Even though I run Ubuntu on some of my machines, I am not a fan of "The Debian Way". -- Mark Sapiro <m...@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan ------------------------------------------------------ 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
