[Mailman-Users] Why Not Upgrade to 2.1.8?

Dragon dragon at crimson-dragon.com
Fri Aug 25 17:07:36 CEST 2006


Allan Trick wrote:
>At 09:18 AM 8/25/2006, Barry Finkel wrote:
>
> >I have seen many posts on this list from people who are running
> >2.1.5 (or earlier).  I am wondering why someone would recently
> >upgrade to 2.1.5 instead of to 2.1.8, which is the current release?
>
>Barry,
>
>I know one reason we don't upgrade every time one comes out is we
>want to be sure everything is stable.  I'm sure it is, but sometimes
>people talk about a feature not working right in a release and we
>think we know everything's working properly in the one we have, so 
>why upgrade.

Security for one. Much of the impetus for releasing later versions in 
the 2.1.X branch was for that reason.

See http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/security.html for some more 
info on that. The release notes for each release also explain any 
other changes.

>Also, we usually hire someone to come in and help us with upgrades
>like this.  If the upgrade process were really cut and dried, and
>there was virtually no possibility that something weird could happen,
>then maybe us non-guru folks would attempt it.  Is there a document
>explaining the upgrade process, and is it considered a pretty simple
>thing to do?

The process is described in the UPGRADING file that is part of the 
source for each release.

I found it pretty simple.

It basically comes down to a few simple steps as long as you have a 
version of Python that is recent enough for the package. If you are 
already running 2.1.5 then that is covered for installing 2.1.8.

1. Download the tarball.

2. Extract the files from the tarball.

3. Run configure (you may need to change a few options there to get 
it to set things up properly, mainly to do with what group your MTA 
and web server execute under and what owner/group mailman execute as).

4. Run make

5. Stop mailman and your MTA while doing the install. (Use 
bin/mailmanctl stop to shutdown mailman).

6. Run make install

7. Start your MTA and mailman ( bin/mailmanctl start.

The only thing I can see that may complicate things is if you used an 
RPM or other package to install that does not use the standard file 
locations for mailman.

If everything goes well, it is literally less than 30 minutes to do 
all of this and you only have to keep mailman and your MTA off line 
for maybe 5 or 10 minutes.

Dragon

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