[Mailman-Developers] Installing/upgrading Mailman, as root, or as mailman?

[Greg Connor]

Hi Mailman developers.

I have installed mailman of various versions on a couple different
servers, and have had to upgrade the mailman installation to a later
version about three times (I think they were 1.0, 1.1, and most recently
I tried to install 2.0b6 and failed.)

My observation is this: when I extract the tarfile and get ready to do a
"make install," shouldn't it stop me (or at least warn me) if I try to
do this install as "root"?  My previous experience is that if I do a
"make install" as root, instead of as mailman, it seems to screw up all
the permissions, and I can never get it all set right again... this has
happened twice (at 1.0 and 1.1) and now it seems to be happening again
with 2.0b6.  It turns out it's usually easier to restore from backup
than to run bin/check_perms and try to fix all the broken permissions. 
(Earlier versions didn't catch everything like lock files and archives,
so there would still be errors after bin/check_perms was done.  I
haven't had a chance to test this in 2.0b6...

My suggestion:  how about a makefile entry that checks to see if you're
root, and bails, saying something like "You must run make install as
mailman, not as root" (according to what user they chose during
configure).  (Of course bin/check_perms might be smart enough to handle
this now.. I don't know because bin/check_perms kept dying and dumping
core and I finally had to restore to mailman 1.1 to get it working
again.

Thanks for a great product.
gregc
--
Greg Connor <gconnor@nekodojo.org>
PGP: 6649 347A 025D 0AFD 3EBC  F0E3 D884 D9AE B9B6 173B