Bugs item #596565, was opened at 2002-08-17 17:13 You can respond by visiting: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=100103&aid=596565&group_id=103

Category: configuring/installing Group: 2.1 beta

Status: Closed Resolution: Accepted Priority: 5 Submitted By: Todd Vierling (tvierling) Assigned to: Barry A. Warsaw (bwarsaw) Summary: mailman should use alphabetic U/GIDs

Initial Comment: In short: "compiling in numeric IDs is Very Evil."

The long story:

I'm trying to put together a packaging environment for NetBSD's "pkgsrc" to allow easy build and install of Mailman. Unfortunately, this is currently impossible thanks to the fact that alphabetic IDs are resolved to numerics at compile time. (Nearly all packages requiring cutstom IDs resolve them at runtime using get {pw,gr}nam(3)).

Thanks to this behavior, it is not currently possible to:

• create a prebuilt binary package of Mailman, and install it later on a system without the source tarball;
• migrate an existing installation of Mailman to another system that has a uid/gid conflict without recompiling.

There are other problems that compiled-in numeric IDs cause, but these two really stick out.

I'm not a Pythonhead, so I don't claim to know how to fix this correctly. However, I've attached a diff for configure.in that sets the framework for the start of fixing this problem. In particular, the diff changes the MM_FIND_*_ID macros to report the ID that matched without resolving names to numbers, and allows the build to proceed if forced --with-{user,group}name options are specified and those IDs don't exist at build time. (The latter case helps autopackaging in systems like NetBSD's pkgsrc, where the IDs may be autocreated *between* the "configure" and "make install" phases.)

The things that still need to be done include fixing the main scripts, and the checkperms logic, to cope with either numeric or alphabetic IDs; and possibly adding a runtime configuration of IDs (which really helps if the admin needs to reconfigure or change the mail or Web servers, while avoiding to rebuild Mailman).

I openly welcome Python gurus to look into what's *really* needed to fix this....

Comment By: Barry A. Warsaw (bwarsaw) Date: 2002-08-23 16:03

Message: Logged In: YES user_id=12800

I've thought about it more and I am going to apply this patch.

Comment By: Barry A. Warsaw (bwarsaw) Date: 2002-08-22 18:45

Message: Logged In: YES user_id=12800

I like this idea a lot, even though the patch is far too incomplete. Fortunately, you motivated me to hack the code to support symbolic names instead of numeric ids.

Attached is a patch I intend to commit for MM2.1b4. Would you please try it and see if it accomplishes what you need? One minor ugliness is that it retains --with-cgi-gid and --with-mail-gid as the configure switches to set the wrapper group names. Given the communities knowledge about these switches, I'm inclined not to change or deprecate them.

You can respond by visiting: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=100103&aid=596565&group_id=103