RE: [Mailman-Developers] Min requirements for running Mailman?
-----Original Message----- From: mailman-developers-bounces+john.airey=rnib.org.uk@python.org [mailto:mailman-developers-bounces+john.airey=rnib.org.uk@pyth on.org]On Behalf Of Tollef Fog Heen Sent: Monday, 06 September 2004 16:47 To: mailman-developers@python.org Subject: Re: [Mailman-Developers] Min requirements for running Mailman?
- Nigel Metheringham
| I'd tend to take this as:- | * Mailman is a bitch to package
Not really. It's fairly well-behaved in my experience. It's a semi-large web application with some requirements, but nothing unreasonable.
| * RH have packaged it for a while | * RH found a good few of the gotchas in packaging Mailman | * RH have subsequently learnt from their mistakes and recently | have produced good packages. | * Other distros may do better, or may yet have to learn from their | mistakes :-)
Mailman has been in Debian since June 1998 (1.0b4), so we've been working on it for a while as well. I think our packages are of good quality (far from perfect, but making perfect packages is _a lot_ of work. ;)
Just to throw my tuppence worth in...
I've used mailman since Red Hat 7.2. I found that the version that came with Red Hat 9.0 wouldn't work for me (ie I couldn't upgrade to it) so I stuck with the 7.2 version (2.0.13) till the end of Red Hat 9 support.
We are now running the 2.1.5 version that comes with Fedora but running it on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). I did however have to recreate all the lists by hand in an overnight shift (what fun that was...) a few days before leaving the country (hence the rush). At that time I didn't know I could export the configuration (Doh!).
Red Hat have taken some packages out of RHEL eg arpwatch and mysql-server (although this is in the "extras" channel) even though these are in the source RPM. Mailman is currently not included but might be being put back in to RHEL 4.0. I would like to hope so, as I find 2.1.5 far superior to 2.0.13.
On Thu, 2004-09-09 at 08:15, John.Airey@rnib.org.uk wrote:
Red Hat have taken some packages out of RHEL eg arpwatch and mysql-server (although this is in the "extras" channel) even though these are in the source RPM. Mailman is currently not included but might be being put back in to RHEL 4.0. I would like to hope so, as I find 2.1.5 far superior to 2.0.13.
Mailman 2.1.5 is in RHEL 4
John Dennis jdennis@redhat.com
On Thu, 2004-09-09 at 10:31 -0400, John Dennis wrote:
On Thu, 2004-09-09 at 08:15, John.Airey@rnib.org.uk wrote:
Red Hat have taken some packages out of RHEL eg arpwatch and mysql-server (although this is in the "extras" channel) even though these are in the source RPM. Mailman is currently not included but might be being put back in to RHEL 4.0. I would like to hope so, as I find 2.1.5 far superior to 2.0.13.
Mailman 2.1.5 is in RHEL 4
Am I right in thinking that 2.1.5 does not have backward compatibility with 2.0.x versions, so it is not possible to directly upgrade a 2.0.x to 2.1.x?
I was certainly unable to take lists to 2.1.5 when I tried recently on full system upgrade - I ended up recreating the lists with significant pain involved.
Nigel.
At 3:48 PM +0100 2004-09-09, Nigel Metheringham wrote:
Am I right in thinking that 2.1.5 does not have backward compatibility with 2.0.x versions, so it is not possible to directly upgrade a 2.0.x to 2.1.x?
It takes a little more work, yes. See
http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq04.032.htp.
I was certainly unable to take lists to 2.1.5 when I tried recently on full system upgrade - I ended up recreating the lists with significant pain involved.
IIRC, that's basically one of the suggested methods.
On Thu, 2004-09-09 at 17:20 +0200, Brad Knowles wrote:
At 3:48 PM +0100 2004-09-09, Nigel Metheringham wrote:
Am I right in thinking that 2.1.5 does not have backward compatibility with 2.0.x versions, so it is not possible to directly upgrade a 2.0.x to 2.1.x?
It takes a little more work, yes. See http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq04.032.htp.
I think its rather worse than that against (at least) 2.1.5. Mailman refuses to touch any of the old list sets because they are missing certain required keys in the list data - related to topics from what I remember.
Someone with better python skills than I (probably the majority of people here) could have fixed up the list structure from the bit of code that exploded, but I found pretty much all the mailman tools just exploded when they saw the list data. I guess the upgrade code in versions.py can't handle that particular shift anymore.
Nigel.
At 4:37 PM +0100 2004-09-09, Nigel Metheringham wrote:
Someone with better python skills than I (probably the majority of people here) could have fixed up the list structure from the bit of code that exploded, but I found pretty much all the mailman tools just exploded when they saw the list data. I guess the upgrade code in versions.py can't handle that particular shift anymore.
Hmm. To do the upgrade and let the automated tools handle most
things for you, might require upgrading from 2.0.x to an earlier 2.1.x version, and then to 2.1.5. Not pretty. ;(
On Thu, 2004-09-09 at 10:48, Nigel Metheringham wrote:
Am I right in thinking that 2.1.5 does not have backward compatibility with 2.0.x versions, so it is not possible to directly upgrade a 2.0.x to 2.1.x?
It should be possible, but it's not something I've tested in a very long tim.e
I was certainly unable to take lists to 2.1.5 when I tried recently on full system upgrade - I ended up recreating the lists with significant pain involved.
Can you provide details? I consider it a bug that lists cannot be upgrade from 2.0.13 to 2.1.6. You might need to upgrade from 2.0.x where x < 13, to 2.0.13 first though.
-Barry
Barry Warsaw wrote:
On Thu, 2004-09-09 at 10:48, Nigel Metheringham wrote:
I was certainly unable to take lists to 2.1.5 when I tried recently on full system upgrade - I ended up recreating the lists with significant pain involved.
Can you provide details? I consider it a bug that lists cannot be upgrade from 2.0.13 to 2.1.6. You might need to upgrade from 2.0.x where x < 13, to 2.0.13 first though.
There have been reports on the mailman-users list of difficulties in moving/upgrading lists from older versions. After grappling with these issues in my own mind, I have concluded that the likely explanation is not that the new Mailman can't update the old list's config.db, but rather that the marshal format of the old lists config.db is not compatible with the Python on the new system.
Does this seem reasonable, or am I off track here.
-- Mark Sapiro msapiro@value.net The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
On Mon, 2005-05-30 at 16:54, Mark Sapiro wrote:
There have been reports on the mailman-users list of difficulties in moving/upgrading lists from older versions. After grappling with these issues in my own mind, I have concluded that the likely explanation is not that the new Mailman can't update the old list's config.db, but rather that the marshal format of the old lists config.db is not compatible with the Python on the new system.
Does this seem reasonable, or am I off track here.
I think it's possible, but I'm not sure this is the real problem. OT1H, marshal is not guaranteed to be portable across Python versions (which is one reason we use pickle now). I searched through Python's NEWS and HISTORY files and while I did see a few changes to marshal mentioned, they aren't changes that I think would have affected Mailman's data files.
OTOH, it's possible that changes did occur that are biting us. However, I just tried to store a dictionary that contained just strings, floats, and ints. Created the file under Python 2.1.3 and read it back with Python 2.4.1 and had no problems. That doesn't necessarily mean we're safe, but it makes it less likely that this is the problem.
-Barry
On Mon, 2005-05-30 at 16:07 -0400, Barry Warsaw wrote:
On Thu, 2004-09-09 at 10:48, Nigel Metheringham wrote:
One of us is in a timewarp here....
Am I right in thinking that 2.1.5 does not have backward compatibility with 2.0.x versions, so it is not possible to directly upgrade a 2.0.x to 2.1.x?
It should be possible, but it's not something I've tested in a very long tim.e
I was certainly unable to take lists to 2.1.5 when I tried recently on full system upgrade - I ended up recreating the lists with significant pain involved.
Can you provide details? I consider it a bug that lists cannot be upgrade from 2.0.13 to 2.1.6. You might need to upgrade from 2.0.x where x < 13, to 2.0.13 first though.
This is 9 months ago... so my memory is not as good as it should be. However if I remember rightly it was down to features that were added during the 2.1.x series with a related change in database format.
You can do 2.0.13 -> 2.1.x where x <= 3 (from memory), but not direct to 2.1.5
[This is probably worth looking at because I see a significant number of sites still on 2.0.x unfortunately].
Nigel.
On Mon, 2005-05-30 at 17:22, Nigel Metheringham wrote:
This is 9 months ago... so my memory is not as good as it should be.
The hazards of cleaning out a big inbox (on my part ;).
However if I remember rightly it was down to features that were added during the 2.1.x series with a related change in database format.
You can do 2.0.13 -> 2.1.x where x <= 3 (from memory), but not direct to 2.1.5
Okay, I'll see if I can try this.
[This is probably worth looking at because I see a significant number of sites still on 2.0.x unfortunately].
Yeah, it'll be that way forever.
Thanks, -Barry
On Mon, 2005-05-30 at 17:22, Nigel Metheringham wrote:
You can do 2.0.13 -> 2.1.x where x <= 3 (from memory), but not direct to 2.1.5
I did a simple upgrade from 2.0.14 to 2.1.6 and it went through just fine. However I only updated a single mailing list, so it's possible something broke with the other data file that get updated.
I search the open bugs for related issues and found SF bug #949117, which is now fixed in CVS. There are two other possible bugs still open that might be related #998384 and #1041791.
-Barry
participants (6)
-
Barry Warsaw -
Brad Knowles -
John Dennis -
John.Airey＠rnib.org.uk -
Mark Sapiro -
Nigel Metheringham