Barry Finkel wrote:

When I upgraded my test Ubuntu system from Mailman 2.1.9 to 2.1.11 I saw messages for each list:

Updating mailing list: mailman 
Updating the held requests database.
- updating old private mbox file
looks like you have a really recent CVS installation...
you're either one brave soul, or you already ran me
- updating old public mbox file
looks like you have a really recent CVS installation...
you're either one brave soul, or you already ran me
Fixing language templates: mailman 

What is updated in the "private mbox file" and the "public mbox file"? I need to know if I need to backup the

/var/lib/mailman/archives

directory before I convert. I would prefer not to, as the archives are VERY large.

Over the years (pre Mailman 2.1) the mbox file has been located in different places in the hiereachy and had different names. bin/update (run as the final step of 'make install') is figuring out whether the mbox is in the place where the current release expects it to be, and if it isn't, will move it there. The 'private'

looks like you have a really recent CVS installation... you're either one brave soul, or you already ran me

message (admitedly not a very good message at this point) says that it found archives/private/LISTNAME.mbox/LISTNAME.mbox and didn't find any of the prior (pre 2.1) files so it didn't need to do anything. The 'public' message says it didn't find an actual file (as opposed to a symlink to a directory) at archives/public/LISTNAME and didn't need to do anything there either.

In any case, it doesn't touch the contents of these files at all. It just renames them.

I assume that if something drastic goes wrong with the update, then the only recourse is to restore all of the Mailman directories from a tar backup taken just before the conversion. I assume that just re-installing the Mailman 2.1.9 package (that I am currently running) over the 2.1.11 package will not work. Note that these packages are ones I built from the SourceForge source, not the Ubuntu/Debian packages. Thanks.

That's more or less correct. You can 'force' a downgrade, but it won't undo various config.pck, etc. changes. In many cases including downgrading from 2.1.11 to 2.1.9, the only changes would have been the addition of a couple of list attributes that wouldn't be referenced in 2.1.9 anyway, so a downgrade would be safe, BUT "if something drastic goes wrong with the update", there's no telling what might have been corrupted. It's always a good idea to have a backup.