[Mailman-Users] Recompiling question.

Brad Knowles brad at stop.mail-abuse.org
Sun Apr 30 07:56:55 CEST 2006


At 10:36 PM -0700 2006-04-29, William D. Tallman wrote:

>  What happens if I don't 'install'?

	Then the existing code doesn't get replaced.

>                                      Do the recompiled execuatbles simply
>  remain in the build directory?

	Yes.

>                                      If so, can I then copy them over to
>  /usr/local/mailman/[bin|contrib|cron]?

	If you want to do a manual installation process -- essentially 
duplicating the effect of doing a "make install" -- you can certainly 
choose to do that.  But you do need to make sure that you do all the 
necessary steps, and don't leave anything out.  This includes doing a 
"chown" and "chgrp" of the necessary files with the appropriate 
ownership and permissions, etc....

	Don't skip any necessary steps, otherwise you're likely to be 
left with a non-functional installation.

>                                          Reason I ask is that a simple
>  recompile wasn't exactly addressed in the UPGRADE text, although I did
>  get that I should shut things down while redoing the binaries.

	The problem is that you're thinking of Python as if it were C. 
It's not.  In Python, we replace the source code files, and let 
Python do a recompile on-the-fly, if such is called for.

	So, there really aren't any "binaries" that you are replacing. 
You're replacing the source code, then it's up to Python to notice 
that the source code has changed and do its own reload/recompile -- a 
step that only occurs when the program(s) is/are loaded, which is why 
you need to stop and restart Mailman after replacing the source code.


	Think of it like Basic.  All you have to worry about is the 
source code, and making sure that the system has properly noticed 
that the source code has changed.

>  Or are there configuration files that will have changed, etc?

	Our installation process does not muck around with the mm_cfg.py 
file.  That's all yours.  Once you modify it to suit for your site, 
we don't touch it again.

	But we will replace just about everything else, if need be.

	This is why we strongly encourage everyone to make all their 
modifications in mm_cfg.py, as opposed to other places -- like 
Defaults.py, which would get replaced in an upgrade.

>                                                                 All I
>  seem to need to do is reconfigure with " --with-mail-gid=daemon" in
>  order to satisfy Sendmail, or so says the complaint in /var/log/maillog
>  when I started 'mailmanctl'.

	That's the first step.  You do need to do the reconfigure. 
Afterwards, you need to re-install with the new source code, based on 
the new configuration.

>  In the end, I could simply blow it all away and start over, but that
>  sounds a bit too much like the necessaries for a popular operating
>  software suite.

	Yeah, I don't think this will be necessary.


	To be honest, I think you're over-analyzing this situation.  With 
Mailman the upgrade process is almost always as simple as 
"./configure; make install", just as Mark said.

	In the cases where the upgrade process is not this simple, people 
like Mark and Tokio work very hard to keep the documentation 
up-to-date with whatever the necessary additional steps are.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

  LOPSA member since December 2005.  See <http://www.lopsa.org/>.



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