At 2:03 PM -0400 12/14/06, Pierre Igot wrote:
Believe it or not, I did check the FAQ before submitting my request.
I do believe it.
Try searching for all keywords "message stuck qfiles/in" or simply for "qfiles" in the FAQ, for example. It doesn't return anything that would have helped in my case.
The problem is that we cannot know beforehand all the possible search terms that people might use to describe any given particular type of problem. We can guess, and we can try to capture what we think are the most likely types of descriptions, but that's always a guess and there will always be someone who doesn't make the same guess and instead searches for something else. We can get better at covering more potential different descriptions, but we cannot ever be perfect.
OK, but that didn't happen in my case as far as I know. My problem did not require any references to Mac OS X-specific things. I only provided the Mac-specific information as a courtesy, because it was part of list etiquette.
Actually, there is an Apple-specific issue here. Apple has their own way of starting and stopping the Mailman queue runners and associated processes. If your queue runners aren't running, then you're going to have the kinds of problems that you saw -- regardless of what method is used to stop or start them.
If you're using the Apple-provided code to manage Mailman, you're not going to know anything about the Mailman queue runners. All you're going to know is that something is broken.
So, we have to work backwards from the "it's broke" state to figure out what is broken and who is responsible for that code. Now that we know your problem was a result of the queue runners not actually running, we can tell you that you need to start the queue runners, but since you're using MacOS X Server we can't tell you precisely what the "correct" way is to start them. We can tell you what the Mailman-standard was is to start them, but Apple has created their own code to manage this aspect of Mailman operations and they haven't shared that with us.
Which leads us to the general issue of people expecting us to provide support for a system that someone else has taken and modified, but without sharing any of those changes with us.
Even if the core Mailman system itself is unchanged from what we shipped, they have changed the interface that is used to manage Mailman, but none of the people on this list know anything about it.
Hell, the guy who runs lists.apple.com doesn't know anything about it, and he's running Mailman on machines at Apple that are running MacOS X Server, for Apple users on Apple-specific products -- but even he's not using the Apple-provided version of Mailman.
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