[Mailman-Users] Installation on Mac OSX

[Dan Mick]

> On Wednesday, March 6, 2002, at 01:49 PM, Thomas Hillson wrote:
> 
> > Did you look in the /etc/passd and /etc/group to see if the user and 
> > group were actually placed there. OS-X does not put all the users and 
> > groups in /etc files as it does not use them for all its functions. It 
> > uses the Net-Info files which are different and not all users and 
> > groups that I can created on my OS-X computer are in the passwd and 
> > group files.
> >
> I just placed them there a moment ago, then re-ran the ./configure 
> script and got:
> 
> checking for mailman UID... ./configure: permission denied: conftest.py 
> [1152]
> /usr/local/bin/python: can't open file 'conftest.py'
> cat: conftest.out: No such file or directory
> 
> configure: error:
> ***** No "mailman" user found!
> ***** Your system must have a "mailman" user defined
> ***** (usually in your /etc/passwd file).  Please see the INSTALL
> ***** file for details.
> 
> I know there is a mailman user...I added it using niutil and have 
> confirmed it's there.  I also added the user and groups to the passwd 
> and group files.
> 
> from passwd:
> mailman:*:5990:5990:Mailman List Server:/Users/mailman:/bin/tcsh
> 
> from group:
> mailman:*:5990:mailman
> 
> -Michael

1) all the symptoms of any problem are important, in computers, medicine,
automobile repair, or psychology.  There are three problems above:

1) the configure program can't open conftest.py
2) the cat program can't open conftest.out
3) the configure program can't find the mailman user.

Since conftest.out strongly hints that it comes from conftest.py,
and since the errors appear in that order, it would be eminently
reasonable to assume that 1) causes 2) causes 3).

So let's stop talking about 2) and 3) and focus on 1).

*Why* can't ./configure open conftest.py?

To answer that question, obtain the following:

1) ls -ld of the containing directory ('.' in ./configure)
2) output of id *from the same state you're running ./configure*
(i.e. run ./configure and see the failure, and then immediately
run id at the next shell prompt)