(my advanced apologies for hitting both the -users and -developers lists. I thought it would be applicable to both)

I agree that this error message is pretty ambiguous. I participated in a thread about this started by Harold Paulson whom I thought had a pretty good idea of how to fix this.

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2001-April/010955.html

Since then I've seen this question asked, answered, and ignored many times on the list. I realize that the error message says "Please read the INSTALL instructions again, paying close attention to the --with-cgi-gid configure option", however I don't really see any reason that this shouldn't be more explicit. I'm all for terseness, and I would rather see this list become more terse and the error message grow.

As I mentioned in the April thread, I think that the message should read:

"Mailman CGI error! Mailman was compiled to use GID 48, but the web server is running as GID 99. You must run ./configure again --with-cgi-gid=99, or reconfigure your web server."

Instead of just whining about it like I did last time I figured I'd put together the following patch against 2.0.6 to common.c to make it do just that. I've tested this on my machine and it works just fine.

----------begin patch------------ *** ./src/common.c.bak Wed Sep 5 14:51:51 2001 --- ./src/common.c Wed Sep 5 14:57:43 2001

*** 124,129 **** if (parentgid != mygid) { fatal(ident, GID_MISMATCH, ! "Failure to exec script. WANTED gid %ld, GOT gid %ld. " ! "(Reconfigure to take %ld?)", parentgid, mygid, mygid); } --- 124,131 ---- if (parentgid != mygid) { fatal(ident, GID_MISMATCH, ! "Mailman CGI error! Mailman was compiled to use\n " ! "GID %ld, but the web server is running as GID %ld.\n " ! "You must run ./configure again with the option\n " ! "--with-cgi-gid=%ld, or reconfigure your web server.", parentgid, mygid, mygid); } ----------end patch------------

I hope this is useful,

• Ben

P.S. Notice that the line separator I'm using is just the UNIX separator. I imagine if someone wants to port this to Windows this will need to be fixed, but I don't know enough about python to find a platform portable line separator. Is there such a thing? ( in Perl it's $/ )