Hi Mailman developers.
I have installed mailman of various versions on a couple different servers, and have had to upgrade the mailman installation to a later version about three times (I think they were 1.0, 1.1, and most recently I tried to install 2.0b6 and failed.)
My observation is this: when I extract the tarfile and get ready to do a "make install," shouldn't it stop me (or at least warn me) if I try to do this install as "root"? My previous experience is that if I do a "make install" as root, instead of as mailman, it seems to screw up all the permissions, and I can never get it all set right again... this has happened twice (at 1.0 and 1.1) and now it seems to be happening again with 2.0b6. It turns out it's usually easier to restore from backup than to run bin/check_perms and try to fix all the broken permissions. (Earlier versions didn't catch everything like lock files and archives, so there would still be errors after bin/check_perms was done. I haven't had a chance to test this in 2.0b6...
My suggestion: how about a makefile entry that checks to see if you're root, and bails, saying something like "You must run make install as mailman, not as root" (according to what user they chose during configure). (Of course bin/check_perms might be smart enough to handle this now.. I don't know because bin/check_perms kept dying and dumping core and I finally had to restore to mailman 1.1 to get it working again.
Thanks for a great product. gregc
Greg Connor <gconnor@nekodojo.org> PGP: 6649 347A 025D 0AFD 3EBC F0E3 D884 D9AE B9B6 173B