On 5/11/2012 2:30 PM, Mark Sapiro wrote:
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".
When I was running Mailman on an Ubuntu system, I looked at the Debian
source
changes, and I decided that most were not documented. I had no idea what
they did. I decided to take the Ubuntu package and the SourceForge source
and create my own package. It took me a while to do the initial package,
but after that it was easy. I think that Mark has previously posted to
this list that many of the Debian patches are not needed. There is one that
is wrong - it deletes a library that is sometimes needed. If I needed
assistance on Mailman, I could post to this list and get a quick response.
--Barry Finkel
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