[Mailman-Developers] [ mailman-Bugs-579908 ] Very poor configuration design

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Bugs item #579908, was opened at 2002-07-10 20:53
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Category: configuring/installing
Group: None
>Status: Closed
Resolution: None
Priority: 5
Submitted By: Bob Tanner (tanner)
Assigned to: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody)
Summary: Very poor configuration design

Initial Comment:
The way configure is setup it seems to assume that you
are building mailman ON the box you will be installing it.

This is a terrible design decision. Make for creating
packages a total nightmare.

Forcing a package builder to add entries into
/etc/passwd and /etc/group, is another bad design decision.

Forcing a package builder to have all the directories
setup and proper permissions during build it a another
bad design decision.


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>Comment By: Barry A. Warsaw (bwarsaw)
Date: 2002-08-01 15:56

Message:
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I'm not sure there's anything left to discuss on this bug
report.  If you have suggestions, constructive criticism, or
(preferrably) patches, please bring them to
mailman-developers@python.org

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Comment By: Barry A. Warsaw (bwarsaw)
Date: 2002-07-24 11:36

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Sorry, I don't agree.  They were good design decisions made
for intentional reasons.  You can disagree with them or
suggest better ways to accomplish other goals, of course.

First, sorry, but security demands a mailman user and group
be added to the system.  I don't think this is much
different than a lot of other server type software packages,
such as mail daemons.

As for the second point, in MM2.1 you will be able to
override some of the decisions at configure time, but it
seems to me that most autoconf based programs will have
similar issues, so Mailman's not unique here.

One of the biggest problems IMO is that the gid's are
compiled into the C wrappers.  While this is very good for a
local install, it probably doesn't work well for a package
install.  I'd be open to suggestions (or better yet,
patches) to improve the situation for package builds.

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You can respond by visiting: 
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=100103&aid=579908&group_id=103