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September 2025

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Adding systemd notification to Mailman startup
by Stephen J. Turnbull Nov. 8, 2025

Nov. 8, 2025

Hi y'all Recently there has been a spate of problems with Mailman/systemd integration. It appears that (1) the priesthood of systemd is preparing to deprecate the "simple" and "forking" service types (in favor of the "notify" type in Mailman's case), and (2) adding "notify" capability to Mailman is as simple as adding "python-systemd" to requirements.txt and from systemd.daemon import booted, notify if booted(): # check if systemd ran us notify("READY=1") notify("STATUS=Processing LMTP and REST API") in the "right" place. I have not yet communed with the devil on the details (for example, I don't know how systemd figures out, or even tries, that the "master" process is notifying it that the "mailman start" command has succeeded), but this looks promising (and possibly simple at least from the users' POV). It is a Cython wrapper of the underlying libsystemd0, so it might be preferable that the distro packages (pretty much universally available for recent distro releases) be used where possible rather than wheels from PyPI. (Can we do that?) There are a couple of other notifications, specifically STOPPING, WATCHDOG, and maybe RELOADING, that we might want to add (as above). We would need to think carefully about the MariaDB/MySQL issue documented at https://docs.mailman3.org/en/latest/install/virtualenv.html#starting-mailma… Not sure how to deal with that, as MariaDB appears to be lying about being ready? Although that probably should be dealt with by catching the "DB not ready" exception and waiting a few seconds, at least in the case of MySQL-like databases. WDOT? -- GNU Mailman consultant (installation, migration, customization) Sirius Open Source https://www.siriusopensource.com/ Software systems consulting in Europe, North America, and Japan

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