[Mailman-Users] Old Question, New Twist

[Jon Carnes]

>
> My problem is the age old:
> Failure to exec script. WANTED gid 99, GOT gid 12. (Reconfigure to take
> 12?) 554 5.3.0 unknown mailer error 2
>
> I issued: find / -name configure - and came up with nothing ... I'm
> assuming this is because I didn't compile the program, I simply used a
> Mandrake RPM ...
>
> Since I used an RPM to install Mailman, how do I overcome this error
> using Sendmail?
>
You could work-around this but it will probably be easier to re-install 
from source.

Oddly enough, installing from Source, is exactly twice as hard as 
installing from an RPM - It takes two commands, instead of one.
Well it takes three commands, if you include expanding the source.

The instructions for installing the source also mention your error 
explicitly, and tell you how to fix the problem.

You can download it from Sourceforge.  I recommend that you get v2.06.

You will ftp down the tar-ball (mailman-2.0.6.tar.gz or something similar).
Expand the tar-ball with the command: 
   tar -xzf mailman-2.0.6.tar.gz

This will create a directory called mailman-2.0.6 (or something similar).
   cd mailman-2.0.6
   ./configure
    make install

Assuming that your RPM followed all the other defaults, you should be good 
to go at this point.

This assumes that you already have a valid user and a valid group named 
"mailman".  Also it assumes that /home/mailman exists and is the place you 
want the files installed to (and where the rpm installed the files...).  
You already mentioned that the smrsh link was made.  As long as the 
directories stay the same (rpm vs source) then it's all still good.

Mandrake 8.1 should use "nobody" as the owner of apache, "mail" as the 
owner of sendmail.  Your RPM must have already added the Mailman cgi-bin 
directory to apache.  So it again, it should all work.

I hope this helps!  Once you begin installing tarballs of main 
applications, its hard to stop.  The source is sooo much easier to tweak, 
and it really isn't that hard to install:
   ./configure
   make
   make install

Of course Mailman skips the make step... and that puzzled me for a long 
time, because it was installing pre-compiled modules on my system that 
obviously were not customized to my system (since I had not done a "make" 
after ./configure).  Now I see that ./configure adjusts the source files 
and later, Python, when it runs a module, checks to see if the source is 
newer than the compiled module.  If so, it recompiles the module for you 
automagically.  Python is cool!

Jon Carnes