[Mailman-Users] Newbie Questions

[Corbett J. Klempay]

Note: I made the mistake of sending this same message just to klm
yesterday before realizing (reading, more like) that I should just send
these types of messages to the list in general...so here you go: 

Hey there...I'm a member of my school (Johns Hopkins) ACM chapter...we
just brought this machine
(www2.acm.jhu.edu/chimera.acm.jhu.edu/projects.acm.jhu.edu) online earlier
this month, and now that it's provent to be stable, we're going to move
our mail and list services over to it (from an old PowerMac).  Right now,
we use Majordomo for lists; I don't administer our Majordomo installation
myself, but will probably have a hand in the list administration once it's
moved.  Earlier this year, I became a big Python fan (I even gave a
tutorial peer teaching session on it at one of our ACM meetings), and
*really* liked the whole look/feel/functionality of the Pipermail setup on
python.org. I have been starting to learn about Majordomo some lately (in
anticipation of having to deal with it for the transition), and I'm
thinking that it's not really all that cool :)  So, I checked the Python
site to see what you guys were running, and I must say, from initial
impressions, Mailman is much slicker (functionality wise and *especially*
user-wise with the whole clean web interface).  The thing is, I'm
wondering...documentation seems sparse.  Not having much experience with
even Majordomo, I'm wondering if you could maybe give me the Reader's
Digest version of how I'd move our Majordomo lists to a Mailman
installation (and how I'd install Mailman) on this new machine (the new
machine is a Red Hat 5.0, soon to be 5.1 installation; detailed info about
all aspects of the machine are available through our website).  Are there
any disadvantages to using Mailman vs. Majordomo?  If I get too much
resistence to using Mailman from the other machine admins, I think I'll
have to try something like MajorCool with Majordomo...but Mailman seems to
be a much cleaner solution.  Also, how easy is it to install and get
Pipermail running?  It seems way cool :)  Sorry if I'm taking up a little
chunk of your time; I just want to get this installed on the new machine
(or at least know how) so that they don't beat me to the punch with a
Majordomo install (after which they'd be more reluctant to pull it out and
let me toy with Mailman :)

Keep up the good work! 

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Corbett J. Klempay			         Quote of the Week:
http://www2.acm.jhu.edu/~cklempay  "There exists in India no politician
				    daring enough to attempt to explain
                                    to the masses that cows can be eaten."

PGP Fingerprint: 7DA2 DB6E 7F5E 8973 A8E7  347B 2429 7728 76C2 BEA1
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