[Mailman-Users] Has anyone successfully installed Mailman

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Sat, 20 Nov 2004, greg deputy wrote:

>
> >
> > So you can't install the precompiled RPM without Python 2.2
> > runtime support and you can't install the source RPM for
> > rebuilding without the python-devel 2.2 package.  If you have
> > enough Python support to build the RPM, you should have
> > enough to build Mailman from scratch.
> >
> > Note that in Red Hat distros, many development tools are
> > split into <pkgname> for runtime support and <pkgname>-devel
> > for developers.  Greg Deputy probably doesn't have the
> > python-devel RPM, which he needs to build Mailman, although
> > he has the python RPM, which is enough to run Mailman.
> >
> > But I'm not quite clear on why one would want to build
> > Mailman from scratch, when there are perfectly good Mailman
> > RPMs already available for Fedora Core.
>
> Yup, I was missing the python-devel package.  Dropped that in and
> mailman is now built and happy.
>
> I'm relatively new to linux, and I've found some things are easier
> installed as a package and others from source.  This is just my personal
> perception, of course.  I generally try to install from source first, I
> feel like I get more control over how it ends up working that way.

Some people with many years of experience maintain that attitude too, and
it's OK.  But I've come to believe that for most things, RPMs (or working
with whatever packaging system the distro uses--.debs for Debian, etc) are
the way to go.  For one thing, all the Red Hat/Fedora automated update
services rely on it.  It records where files are installed so they can be
located and/or removed when necessary, and it manages dependency issues
such as the one you just ran into.  Up2date, Yum, and Synaptic package
amnagers even find and install missing dependencies automatically.

You can always customize stuff post-install if it's not a feature that
needs to be compiled in, and you can always grab the SRPM and rebuild if
necessary while reaping all the other benefits.

>
> Thanks for the help.

You're welcome.

-- 
		Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs