Hello,

I need multiple instances of mailman for separate name space between virtual domains, as I'm not willing to patch if I can avoid it (I'd rather migrate to a virtual-hosting capable mailman once it goes out).

However, installing multiple mailman instances from source with a different $PREFIX could make things difficult in a production environment, especially regarding security updates.

In a perfect world (from the sysadmin point of vue) the prefix should be configurable through an environment variable or a configuration file (but the latter would be more complicated, as you would have to be able to choose the mm_cfg.py from the command line). That way, it would be trivial to set up several instances by copiying data files and linking binaries / script. a simple wrapper (shell, or C, or whatever) could then call the right binaries from the current path or an additional parameter. A security upgrade would then be just a matter of reinstalling the files in the master installation

I'm far from being a python coder (I know perl and shell a lot better), but I can't see from the code where that could cause a problem. The C CGI won't represent a problem either, just need to use the environment with perhaps a default value for the $prefix value instead of hard-coding it at compilation time. Is there anything preventing us to modify the code in such a way ? Am I missing something obvious, or underestimating the difficulties ? Please tell me what you think.

Cheers,

-- Clément Hermann (nodens)