[Mailman-Developers] Mailman 2.x Virtual Hosting

[Mark Sapiro]

On 6/24/2011 6:06 AM, Pavel Šimerda wrote:
> 
> First thing that surprised me is that Mailman doesn't support virtual
> hosting. The second one was that documentation claimes it does. Even the
> simplest test, creation of lists with same names under different domains
> shows 2.x vhost support is simply broken.


As Barry said, please point out where in the documentation it says that
Mailman 2.1 supports lists with the same name in different domains.


> There are several modified versions of Mailman that claim to support
> vhosts. Mark Sapiro's version didn't work for me (most commands resulted
> in errors). It could have been broken by merging upstream code.
> 
> https://code.launchpad.net/~msapiro/mailman/vhost


If you are saying that it the above branch could have been broken by
merging of post 2.1.13 upstream changes, I don't think so, but if it
was, I'll try to fix it. I think it's more likely that things are poorly
documented, particularly bin/newlist, which if I recall correctly is
very unintuitive in the vhost branch.

Please note that the description of this branch says:

  If you use this branch and encounter problems and report those
  problems to mailman-users at python.org, I may fix them, but only
  if they are easy to fix.

I realize this statement is not highly encouraging, but I am willing to
help. If you tell me specifically what the issues are, I will at least
look at them.


> There is a pretty good resource with patches at koumbit.net (in French):
> 
> https://wiki.koumbit.net/VirtualMailman
> 
> I tried to apply the 2.1.13 patch to Debian Squeeze's Mailman
> installation. And it sort of works. You can at least create the mailing
> lists now, which is good.


By the "2.1.13 patch", do you mean the one from
<https://wiki.koumbit.net/VirtualMailman>?


> Postfix virtual alias generator doesn't work. Mails are usually sent
> with wrong list e-mail addresses (the translated ones, not the public
> ones), so it's rather broken. But sending and recieving mail works.
> 
> I would like to know if there's anyone else interested in getting
> Mailman 2.x to support a feature the documentation already claims to
> support.


I am willing to put some effort into this, but I don't want to start
with a set of patches I've never seen before. The work I've done on the
existing branch at <https://code.launchpad.net/~msapiro/mailman/vhost>
was done because someone was trying to use the virtual hosting patches
from Hans Ulrich Niedermann described at
<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-developers/2006-March/018629.html>
and was having difficulty. I fixed all the problems I was made aware of
at that time and have subsequently fixed more problems as I was made
aware of them. Since I don't actually use that branch, I am unlikely to
find problems with it on my own.

I would rather try to fix issues with my existing branch and keep it up
with the official 2.1 branch than start over with a different
implementation. However, If the
<https://wiki.koumbit.net/VirtualMailman> patch is significantly closer
to a well documented, working solution, I'd consider helping fix its
remaining problems.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan