[Mailman-Users] open source/open science using mailman

[Stephen Adler]

To the Authors and maintainers of mailman.

I want to thank you for providing such a nice mail list server software
package. I've set it (1.0rc3) up on openscience.bnl.gov which is the main web
server for the "Open Source/Open Science" conference, to be held
at Brookhaven National Labs on Oct. 2nd. (wee http://openscience.bnl.gov
for more details.) Mailman is now in use to manage the various mail
list groups I've setup to help manage the conference.

Once again, thanks. Of the mail list management software packages which
I've used, (majordomo, and listproc) this is an order of magnitude
improvment.

With that said, there was one small installation problem I had. It has
to do with running bin/check_perms. It failed because the file
/home/mailman/data/adm.pw did not exist. There wasn't anything in the
INSTALL file which said anything about it. So I did a

  thouch /home/mailman/data/adm.pw
  chmod 640 /home/mailman/data/adm.pw

and that made bin/check_perms happy.

Another bit. I'm running redhat 6.0 and I use the "adduser" command
to create the mailman account. In doing so, redhat setups up the gnome
and kde environtments. Here is a ls -la output on the mailman account


[adler at ssadler mailman]$ ls -la
total 34
drwxrwsr-x  20 mailman  mailman      1024 Jul 25 13:18 ./
drwxr-xr-x  18 root     root         1024 Jul 25 13:23 ../
-rw-------   1 mailman  mailman       103 Jul 24 09:32 .Xauthority
-rw-r--r--   1 mailman  mailman      1422 Jul 23 16:38 .Xdefaults
-rw-------   1 mailman  mailman      1481 Jul 24 09:57 .bash_history
-rw-r--r--   1 mailman  mailman        24 Jul 23 16:38 .bash_logout
-rw-r--r--   1 mailman  mailman       230 Jul 23 16:38 .bash_profile
-rw-r--r--   1 mailman  mailman       124 Jul 23 16:38 .bashrc
drwxr-xr-x   3 mailman  mailman      1024 Jul 23 16:38 .kde/
-rw-r--r--   1 mailman  mailman       966 Jul 23 16:38 .kderc
-rw-r--r--   1 mailman  mailman      3505 Jul 23 16:38 .screenrc
drwx--S---   2 mailman  mailman      1024 Jul 25 13:18 .xauth/
drwxr-xr-x   5 mailman  mailman      1024 Jul 23 16:38 Desktop/
drwxrwsr-x   6 mailman  mailman      2048 Jul 23 17:22 Mailman/
drwxrwsr-x   4 mailman  mailman      1024 Jul 23 16:40 archives/
drwxrwsr-x   2 mailman  mailman      1024 Jul 23 16:40 bin/
drwxrwsr-x   2 mailman  mailman      1024 Jul 23 16:40 cgi-bin/
drwxrwsr-x   2 mailman  mailman      1024 Jul 23 16:40 cron/
drwxrwsr-x   2 mailman  mailman      1024 Jul 24 13:26 data/
drwxrwsr-x   2 mailman  mailman      1024 Jul 23 16:40 filters/
drwxrwsr-x   4 mailman  mailman      1024 Jul 24 09:46 lists/
drwxrwsr-x   2 mailman  mailman      1024 Jul 25 13:12 locks/
drwxrwsr-x   2 mailman  mailman      1024 Jul 25 12:00 logs/
drwxrwsr-x   2 mailman  mailman      1024 Jul 23 16:40 mail/
drwxrwsr-x   2 mailman  mailman      1024 Jul 23 17:20 public_html/
drwxrwsr-x   2 mailman  mailman      1024 Jul 23 16:40 scripts/
drwxrwxr-x   3 mailman  mailman      1024 Jul 23 16:39 src/
drwxrwsr-x   2 mailman  mailman      1024 Jul 23 16:40 templates/

Notice the Descktop and .kde direstories amongst others. bin/check_perms
will sift through all directories and thus complain about .kde,
Desktop, src (the directory in which I did the build). I just ignored
these errors, but maybe check_perms should only check the files and
directories it cares about so that other non-essential directories
can co-exist along with them. (i.e. .kde, Desktop, so on and so forth.)

Finally, I looked in the redhat contrib site and I didn't find a mailman
rpm. Are there any "out there?" If not, I will be glad to spend a couple
of hours and write the .spec file needed to make them. Its the least I
could do.

Cheers. Steve.