Brad Knowles wrote:

Even if they have made the source code available for everything they've done with regards to Mailman (which includes all their proprietary management tools), this is not the same thing as contributing that code back to the Mailman project.

But what value would MacOSX specific integrations be to the Mailman project? I think that they'd likely be of limited value. Just as Debian or Red Hat specific changes are. I know that John Dennis of Red Hat contributed the changes Red Hat made to make mailman fit in better with the FHS. But even those changes are not accepted and they are far more likely to be of general use than a Mac OSX service manage script. (I'm not arguing that they should have been, just using it as an example.)

If a vendor make changes to the functionality that improve upon things in Mailman, they yes, those changes would be great to see merged back in and it's good to chide those that don't do so. I am not aware that those are the sort of changes anyone has said Apple's made.

ISTM that often when a vendor makes such changes, they make them without the flexibility that would be needed to get them into the main code base. For example, cPanel has patched mailman to allow for lists of the same name and a different domain name within a single mailman install. But they have done it in a rather hacky and inelegant way so it's doubtful that even if they sent a patch to the developers list that it'd get accepted. It's only partially baked. :)

Same any other group that takes our code and makes modifications to it -- even if they make all their source code publicly available, that's not the same thing as contributing it back to the Mailman project.

To me it makes a difference what sort of modifications you're talking about. Most of the modifications in this thread and similar threads deal with changes a vendor or distro make to integrate mailman into their specific way of doing things. And I think those changes aren't likely to be useful to the project as a whole. So that's the part where I think it's unfair to criticize vendors and distros over.

Obviously, those changes do impact the ability of folks here to offer help to those who ask for it. It is a good thing to remind those posters that they should check in with their vendor/distro to ensure that the problems they're having aren't vendor/distro specific. This is somewhat akin to the need to ask a poster where they installed mailman before anyone here can say "run this" or "edit that."

Whereas I was an Apple fan from 1982, back in the original Apple ][ days, and before the introduction of the 16K language card, the Apple II+, the Apple IIe, the Apple //c, or any other more recent Apple product. I've been a MacFanatic since December of 1983 when I saw an early prototype behind closed doors. I've been a Mac owner since the day when I bought a Mac SE -- before the internal hard drive model was available.

I certainly won't argue that you've got me handily beat in terms of experience and breadth of exposure to various systems. :-)

My point mainly is that it sometimes comes across that vendors/distros who install mailman and add to or change it to integrate it into their system gets painted as doing something wrong. I don't think that's the intent, but I felt it worth mentioning and pointing to the Apple code. For anyone interested in checking specifically what Apple has changed about the Mailman code, it's there.

Ideally a few Apple users would hang out on this list and could help to guide those who are asking for assistance and using the Apple installed Mailman. In that way, we'd all learn a little more about how to solve people's problems with Mailman.

-- Todd OpenPGP -> KeyID: 0xBEAF0CE3 | URL: www.pobox.com/~tmz/pgp

The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. -- Frederick Douglass