[Mailman-Developers] Let's try to package mailman3 in Debian!

[Bernhard Schmidt]

Pierre-Elliott Bécue <becue at crans.org> wrote:

Hi Pierre,

> Before requesting for sponsorship, and packaging officially the other
> components of mailman3, I'd like some "testers" for the core package I
> built, in order to be sure that it works, and that I will not introduce some
> stupid caveats on the packaging of the other components.
>
> .deb can be found here: http://peb.pimeys.fr/mailman/mailman3-core/
> git repo can be found there: https://gitlab.pimeys.fr/PEB/mailman3-core
> and there: https://github.com/P-EB/mailman3-core
>
> Any volunteer welcome! Please, I need your help, I cannot review my work
> alone! :)

I just tried to have a look in a stretch docker image.

- There are three .deb files on your webserver

  mailman3-core_3.0.0-1_all.deb
  mailman3-core_3.0.0-3_all.deb
  mailman3-core_3.0.0-3_amd64.deb

  It is not immediately obvious which one to test, since -1 has actually
  a newer timestamp.

- Mailman Core 3.0.1 and 3.0.2 have been released in the meantime

- it does not work on stretch/sid because it is not compatible with
  Python 3.5, see https://gitlab.com/mailman/mailman/issues/181

- it does not install on Jessie (even with jessie-backports because of
  missing dependencies) (just a note because of not working on stretch
  either)

- The systemd unit won't work because the parameter for the
  configuration file is '-C', not '-c'

- installing python3.4 and changing the shebang in /usr/bin/mailman
  leads to the following error

  root at 4ca9477a166c:~# /usr/bin/mailman -C /etc/mailman3/mailman.cfg start
  Starting Mailman's master runner
  /usr/bin/python3.4: can't open file '/var/lib/mailman/bin/master':
  [Errno 2] No such file or directory

  The files are installed in /var/lib/mailman3/bin, but bin_dir in
  /etc/mailman3/mailman.cfg points to /var/lib/mailman/bin ... both
  directories are wrong from my POV, it should probably be
  /usr/lib/mailman3 or something like that

- Fixing this up leads to

  root at 4ca9477a166c:~# /usr/bin/mailman -C /etc/mailman3/mailman.cfg start
  Starting Mailman's master runner
  Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "/var/lib/mailman3/bin/master", line 9, in <module>
      load_entry_point('mailman==3.0.0', 'console_scripts', 'master')()
    File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/mailman/bin/master.py", line 536,
  in main
      with open(config.PID_FILE, 'w') as fp:
  FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory:
  '/run/mailman3/master.pid'

  because the directory does not exist. Since you are shipping a systemd
  unit only you should probably ship a .tmpfile as well.

I now have a running daemon. I haven't done anything with Mailman3 so
far, so I need to read up on that first.

Bernhard