[Mailman-Users] Mailman archive messages(not rm, but install!)

[Brad Knowles]

At 3:16 PM +0900 12/9/06, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

>                                The mailman package did install a
>  complete Mailman on several Debian systems where I use Mailman.

Understood.  At least, now I do.


The problem is that the conversation I had with Alan up to that point 
had lead me to believe that we were talking about a standard Mailman 
installation as provided in package format by Debian, and yet Alan's 
configuration clearly lacked what I consider to be a pretty important 
core component.

There's a disconnect there, but I wasn't seeing it.  And the way John 
approached the situation in his response was ... not appreciated.

>  This policy will occasionally result in the kind of problem we see
>  here.  It's a tradeoff.  You don't like it as it manifests on
>  Mailman-Users, and you shouldn't---all we're ever going to see here is
>  the bugs.  But all you need to say is "the Mailman project distributes
>  Mailman with the pipermail archiver included.  If you don't have it,
>  it is a packaging issue.  Your vendor Debian needs to know about it,
>  and you need to get support from them."

Actually, when all is said and done, I think John did have a valid 
point, and we need to modify this slightly.

We need to go further and tell them that this *may* be a packaging 
issue, and that they need to consult with their administrator or 
their vendor, or whomever actually installed the software or is 
responsible for administering the software and/or hardware, to 
confirm whether or not this actually is a standard version installed 
from a package somewhere, or if this has been customized by someone. 
If the former, then they would need to contact the vendor who created 
the package, otherwise they need to contact whomever did the 
customization.

But someone needs to find a simpler way to explain this.

>  In sum, I think you are doing the Mailman project a disservice by
>  denigrating Debian.  If they're really doing their users such a
>  disservice, you (or somebody from Mailman who understands the issues)
>  should report it as a bug.  In my experience the various distros,
>  including Debian, are responsive to upstream maintainers.

I still don't feel that we should be responsible for reporting bugs 
to all the hundreds or thousands of distributions, open source OSes, 
commercial OSes, etc....  I don't think that is a goal that would 
should even attempt to chase, because I don't believe that we could 
possibly have the resources necessary to begin to try to achieve it.

We are not the user of the Debian software in question.  We should 
not be required to report what we consider to be bugs through their 
tracking system.

Yes, there should be improved communication between our group and the 
respective parties at the various OS vendors and distributors, but 
that's also a two-way street -- if they're taking our code and making 
any modifications to it, then they should be feeding those back to us.


The real irony here is that I just remembered that at least one 
person responsible for maintaining the Mailman package for Debian has 
subscribed to the mailman-developers list and has started feeding 
back some changes into our system, based on things they've done.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at shub-internet.org>

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