[Mailman-Users] compatibility (NCSA httpd, procmail, mhonarc)

[Ken Manheimer]

In all your compatibility questions you ask if *can* be run with
such-and-such, but of course, it depends to some degree on *how* you're
running such-and-such.  That said, i'll take a stab at answering your
questions.

1) You should be able to run mailman with NCSA httpd.  If it doesn't
   have the ability to specify an additional directory for cgi scripts
   (ie, the ScriptAlias option in apache) then i would expect that you
   could situate the mailman cgi scripts in the standard cgi-bin
   directory, and change the settings that refer to the URL path for
   mailman scripts.

2) Procmail 

   If you're asking about running mailman via a system account filtering
   through procmail, then i'd imagine it can be done with no fuss.  If
   you're asking about running mailman from user accounts running
   procmail, then i expect you'd have to go some effort to get the
   permissions right on the various mailman data files in order to
   ensure that the user's privileges are sufficient to read and write
   what needs to be read and written.  I think it's quite doable, in
   either case.

3) Mhonarc

   As i understand it, on way you can run mhonarc is so that it archives
   messages received as if it was a regular subscriber to the maillist.
   The only problem is the monthly delivery of passwords to the subscriber
   address - they would wind up getting archived, as well, unless
   mhonarc respects the 'X-No-Archive: yes' header which recent versions
   of mailman use.  It ought to, but if it doesn't you can always
   include a filter before the mhonarc filter in the receiving mhonarc
   account's .forward (or .procmail, ow whatever):

8<---------------------------------------------------------------->8
#!/bin/nawk -f 

# Pass stdin to stdout *unless* we hit an exact line "X-No-Archive: yes",
# in which case we just exit, passing nothing.  klm 06/23/1998

{ if (tolower($0) == "x-no-archive: yes") { nogo=1; }
  else { got = got $0 "\n"; } }

END { if (! nogo) {print substr(got, 0, length(got) -1); } }
8<---------------------------------------------------------------->8

   Note that this script will reject messages that have the x-no-archive
   line anywhere, headers or body - it wouldn't take much to make it pay
   attention only to the headers, but the exercise is left to the
   reader...

I hope this helps.  As to your last question (why did you send each
question in a separate message?), i know there are others using mailman
for substantial maillists, but i don't remember the details, so i'll let
people speak for themselves...

Ken Manheimer		  klm at python.org	    703 620-8990 x268
	    (orporation for National Research |nitiatives

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