[Mailman-Users] Virtual domain support

[Mark Sapiro]

Geoff Shang wrote
>
>This stuff looks a bit old.  It's patches against Mailman 2.1.7 and files 
>seem to date back to 2006.  The docs talk about what's going to happen in 
>2008.
>
>Does this code patch against 2.1.12?  Is there newer code than this or 
>should I get it from git?  And is there any more documentation than the 
>ReadMe files on this site?


I just applied the mailman-2.1.7-20060114-to-vhost.patch to the 2.1.12
base and it applied with only two rejects, both of which are easy to
fix. Whether the patched code will actually work and meet your
requirements, I can't say.


>I thought I saw a branch up in the Launchpad project that deals with this. 
>Is that a better place to start than these patches?


Maybe, but I don't see one at
<https://code.launchpad.net/mailman?field.lifecycle=ALL>.


>Are these patches 
>still the recommended way to achieve what I'm looking for?


I don't recommend any of these patches. Multiple Mailman instances is
the recommended way for Mailman 2.1


>My concerns right now are:
>
>1. I need to implement this on a production system, so it has to implement 
>the ability to have the same list names on multiple domains and 
>domain-specific site passwords.  And it needs to be stable (i.e. it needs 
>to work as advertised).


I don't see that these patches implement a domain specific site
password.


>2.  I need to deploy this pretty quickly so I need some documentation or 
>at least people willing to help if I get stuck.


I'm not aware of any documentation for this patch beyond what's in the
README files.


>and
>3.  I need to know if the changes proposed here (or anywhere) will be 
>compatible with what will eventually be adopted in mainline, or at least 
>that there will be some kind of migration path.  I can't really afford to 
>send us down a dead-end path.


My recommendation would be to create separate Mailman instances per
domain. I know you said originally

>3.  Multiple installs. I'd rather not do this if I can help it.  Not
>only do I have to make sure that all of them play nice with the mail
>system (postfix), but I can see the day when we'll want to upgrade, and
>that's going to mean upgrading something like 7 installations.  ergh.


This may be a pain if you use a package that isn't designed for it, but
if you install from source and you have Mailman generating aliases and
virtual maps for Postfix, all this means is you need to add 7 entries
to alias_maps and virtual_alias_maps instead of just one.

And as long as you keep track of your configure commands, upgrading a
source install is very easy and straightforward. Upgrading 7 unpatched
installations is probably easier than upgrading 1 patched one.

We know this works, and there will be a migration path to MM 3.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan