[Mailman-Users] Debian upgrade hell...

[Deirdre Saoirse Moen]

For reasons that have to do with grad school and having started my 
final project for The Class From Hell on another platform, I upgraded 
(hand-compiled) Python 2.1 on my debian system (the only weirdness is 
that I'm running sendmail rather than exim, but otherwise it's a 
pretty stock lightweight debian build).

Oh, and I'm running the testing branch of Debian.

Naturally, cron hated the fact that Python had been upgraded and sent 
me lots of hate mail, for which I created a user and sent it there.

Today that caught up with me, the unhappy cron kvetching had taken my 
load average to 27, at which point sendmail spat a hairball. Note 
that in three years of running the same setup (but until recently on 
SuSE), it's never been that unhappy. Then again, I've never ignored 
it for a week while I was working on finals either.

I'd like to run mailman 2.0, but a) I can't find a debian package 
that wants Python 2.x; b) the ones I can find are for different build 
setups than I have.

Thus, what I'd *really* like is the One True configure incantation 
for debian because I've been working on getting this system unbroken 
(without breaking my as-yet-ungraded grad school final project of 
course) in ten hours with extensive searching of archives and web.

Right now, I have the 2.0.5 tarball from Debian and have patched it. 
However, there's no real help there about what to pass to configure 
and all my guesses thus far have NOT resulted in everything going in 
the happy fun places they need to.