On 06-12-14, at 13:18, Carl Zwanzig wrote:
But the reality was that, in all likelihood, this was a pretty basic problem that had to do with Mailman itself, that it probably had nothing to do with Apple's customizations, and that the most efficient way to get help was probably to submit a request to this
list.From my dim memories, this probably isn't the case as often as it is (the recent thread on pipermail and debian?). Also, if it's a common problem, it's likely to have been addresed in the FAQ or sometime earlier on this list. The number of people that don't check either resource is astounding (esp as evidenced by the responses that simple say "check faq x.yy").
Believe it or not, I did check the FAQ before submitting my request.
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 question is whether it really costs Mailman experts such as yourself so much effort to just provide such basic help from time to time to "newbies" like me using a possibly somewhat non-standard version of Mailman.
The problem that comes up far too often is that someone, such as Mark, says "what's in the vette log?" or "delete /usr/local/mailman/lists/ fred.lock" and the questioner says "where is it?" or "But I don't -have- a /usr/local/mailman" directory". We then start playing 20 questions- do you have root access? which version is installed? which pakcaged version is installed? etc. (iirc, all if which is in faq 3.14)
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.
Mark provided me with a one-line Unix command that happened to work
with my version of Mailman in Mac OS X, but if it hadn't worked, I
would have simply tried to find where "mailmanctl" was on my system,
without bothering the list with such a detail. As it happens, I
didn't have to do this, but I would have done it if required. So I
don't feel that there was anything in my case that forced anyone to
deal with non-standard issues.
Given that mailman and the support are free, I think it's a bit much to expect that the maintainers know exactly how each distributor builds their package (directories, options, etc). They can only say "on a stock system, it works like this", and sometimes "there's a
vette log somewhere, please find it".
And that's all that I was asking for. I didn't ask for anything
beyond this.
Pierre
-- Pierre Igot, administrateur des systèmes / Systems Administrator www.cprp.ca 902-837-7391