Don Steiny wrote:

I am on Debian 2.6.8. I used apt-get to update Python to 2-4 and the latest version of mailman. I used one archive in sources.list;

deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free

When I attempt to start it I get this message:

# # /etc/init.d/mailman start

• Site list for mailman (usually named mailman) missing.
• Please create it; until then, mailman will refuse to start.

This is a Debian package issue. Somehow your update of Mailman and Python has lost your prior Mailman installation.

Searching around the web I found I needed to create a list mailman (though I have not figured out why it was not seeing my existing lists, that is for later)

Assuming your prior Mailman was 2.1.x, you already had a mailman list; it was lost with the others:

I got this; # newlist mailman Memory fault

I thought the problem might be with the debian mailmail I went to sourceforge and downloaded and installed 2.1.11 and nothing changed. I though the problem might be with Python, I downlaoded and installed Python 2.6 and there were changes in that when I tried to install mailman I got this:

Mailman 2.1.11 is not compatible with Python 2.6. Python 2.4 (if properly installed) should be fine; also 2.5.

Compiling /var/lib/mailman/Mailman/i18n.py ... Compiling /var/lib/mailman/Mailman/versions.py ... bin/update:37: DeprecationWarning: the md5 module is deprecated; use hashlib instead import md5 /var/lib/mailman/Mailman/Utils.py:32: DeprecationWarning: the sha module is deprecated; use the hashlib module instead import sha Traceback (most recent call last): File "bin/update", line 51, in <module> from Mailman import MailList File "/var/lib/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 51, in <module> from Mailman.Archiver import Archiver File "/var/lib/mailman/Mailman/Archiver/__init__.py", line 17, in <module> from Archiver import * File "/var/lib/mailman/Mailman/Archiver/Archiver.py", line 32, in <module> from Mailman import Mailbox File "/var/lib/mailman/Mailman/Mailbox.py", line 21, in <module> import mailbox File "/usr/local/lib/python2.6/mailbox.py", line 19, in <module> import email.message ImportError: No module named message make: *** [update] Error 1

This is one of the Python 2.6 incompatibilities.

I copied over the 2.4 mailbox.py file to 2.6 and then I could compile everything with the sha and md5 warnings, which are supposedly no big deal, and I got one tiny change:

/usr/sbin/newlist:96: DeprecationWarning: the sha module is deprecated; use the hashlib module instead import sha Memory fault

What should I do next? Help!

Make sure you have good backups of your Mailman lists/ and archives/private/ directories at a minimum.

Make sure you have a working Python installation no older than 2.4.x and no newer than 2.5.x.

Configure Mailman 2.1.11 with the appropriate prefix, var-prefix, etc to match your existing installation and make install.

-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan