[Christopher Lindsey]

...

first of all, is it okay to use the following apache srm.conf aliases for mailman instead of the one it asks for?

Alias /archives/ /home/mailman/archives/public/ ScriptAlias /lists/ /home/mailman/cgi-bin/

(everything seems to work fine with that except the following)

This isn't going to work (as you already found out) for the private archives.

Well, they could -- and if they weren't it's not necessarily for the reasons you pointed out.

On my Mailman, the public archive for a specific list is referenced from the lists "listinfo" page as

http://HOSTNAME/pipermail/LISTNAME

while lists with private archives have the archive links on the "listinfo" page pointing to

http://HOSTNAME/mailman/private/LISTNAME/

This works perfectly fine for me, with these srm.conf directives:

Alias /pipermail/ /home/mailman/archives/public/ ScriptAlias /mailman/ /home/mailman/cgi-bin/

The "/mailman/private" part of the private archive URL is taken from the PRIVATE_ARCHIVE_URL setting in Mailman/mm_cfg.py, while "/pipermail" comes from PUBLIC_ARCHIVE_URL.

So, this really comes down to how the original posters wants her (or his, I don't know what sex "deadgrrrl" is :) archive URLs to look like.

If my URLs look good, my setup is outlined above. If URLs starting with "http://HOSTNAME/archives" are what is wanted (for both private and public archives), then I think the clean solution would be:

srm.conf: Alias /archives/ /home/mailman/archives/ Mailman/mm_cfg.py: PUBLIC_ARCHIVE_URL = '/archives/public' PRIVATE_ARCHIVE_URL = '/archives/private'

(because I like to reduce the number of srm.conf aliases as much as possible).

Either way, what really matters is that the settings in mm_cfg.py and srm.conf correspond to each other in a correct way.

-- Harald