Bugs item #579908, was opened at 2002-07-10 20:53 You can respond by visiting: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=100103&aid=579908&group_id=103
Category: configuring/installing Group: None Status: Open Resolution: None Priority: 5 Submitted By: Bob Tanner (tanner) Assigned to: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody) Summary: Very poor configuration design
Initial Comment: The way configure is setup it seems to assume that you are building mailman ON the box you will be installing it.
This is a terrible design decision. Make for creating packages a total nightmare.
Forcing a package builder to add entries into /etc/passwd and /etc/group, is another bad design decision.
Forcing a package builder to have all the directories setup and proper permissions during build it a another bad design decision.
Comment By: Barry A. Warsaw (bwarsaw) Date: 2002-07-24 11:36
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Sorry, I don't agree. They were good design decisions made for intentional reasons. You can disagree with them or suggest better ways to accomplish other goals, of course.
First, sorry, but security demands a mailman user and group be added to the system. I don't think this is much different than a lot of other server type software packages, such as mail daemons.
As for the second point, in MM2.1 you will be able to override some of the decisions at configure time, but it seems to me that most autoconf based programs will have similar issues, so Mailman's not unique here.
One of the biggest problems IMO is that the gid's are compiled into the C wrappers. While this is very good for a local install, it probably doesn't work well for a package install. I'd be open to suggestions (or better yet, patches) to improve the situation for package builds.
You can respond by visiting: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=100103&aid=579908&group_id=103