[Mailman-Developers] OSX installation problem - no "mailman" user

John W Baxter jwblist@olympus.net
Thu, 11 Jul 2002 23:09:42 -0700


Greg Westin <westin@fas.harvard.edu> wrote:

>I sent this question to the mailman-users list and got no response, so I
>thought maybe I should try here.  I don't know if this is a problem
>because I'm a novice at these UNIX installations, or if there's
>something wrong with the Darwin installer:

I haven't looked at the configure script (at all...I don't know what
language it's in), but the symptoms sound as if the script is not using
normal system calls to retrieve the mailman user information... the
Pythonic pwd.getpwnam() for example would get it just fine.  Is it doing
the equivalent of
   grep mailman /etc/passwd
?...if so it cannot succeed in a proper Mac OS X (although one could create
the user, find the numeric UID, and use vipw to install the user in
/etc/passwd and whatever we have to install the group in /etc/group.

Barry...you probably know this, but NetInfo is going away in a month or so
("Jaguar") to be replaced by an LDAP-based solution.  So doing a
NetInfo-specific fix would probably be unwise.

  --John (not under Jaguar NDA, and without Jaguar)

-- 
John Baxter    Port Ludlow, WA, USA
I am NOT out of the office.  I will respond if and when I get around to it.