[Mailman-Users] Mailman on Mac OS X Server 10.3: Outgoingmessagesstuck in qrunner/in folder

Brad Knowles brad at shub-internet.org
Thu Dec 14 22:38:35 CET 2006


At 2:03 PM -0400 12/14/06, Pierre Igot wrote:

>  Believe it or not, I did check the FAQ before submitting my request.

I do believe it.

>  Try searching for all keywords "message stuck qfiles/in" or simply
>  for "qfiles" in the FAQ, for example. It doesn't return anything that
>  would have helped in my case.

The problem is that we cannot know beforehand all the possible search 
terms that people might use to describe any given particular type of 
problem.  We can guess, and we can try to capture what we think are 
the most likely types of descriptions, but that's always a guess and 
there will always be someone who doesn't make the same guess and 
instead searches for something else.  We can get better at covering 
more potential different descriptions, but we cannot ever be perfect.

>  OK, but that didn't happen in my case as far as I know. My problem
>  did not require any references to Mac OS X-specific things. I only
>  provided the Mac-specific information as a courtesy, because it was
>  part of list etiquette.

Actually, there is an Apple-specific issue here.  Apple has their own 
way of starting and stopping the Mailman queue runners and associated 
processes.  If your queue runners aren't running, then you're going 
to have the kinds of problems that you saw -- regardless of what 
method is used to stop or start them.

If you're using the Apple-provided code to manage Mailman, you're not 
going to know anything about the Mailman queue runners.  All you're 
going to know is that something is broken.

So, we have to work backwards from the "it's broke" state to figure 
out what is broken and who is responsible for that code.  Now that we 
know your problem was a result of the queue runners not actually 
running, we can tell you that you need to start the queue runners, 
but since you're using MacOS X Server we can't tell you precisely 
what the "correct" way is to start them.  We can tell you what the 
Mailman-standard was is to start them, but Apple has created their 
own code to manage this aspect of Mailman operations and they haven't 
shared that with us.


Which leads us to the general issue of people expecting us to provide 
support for a system that someone else has taken and modified, but 
without sharing any of those changes with us.

Even if the core Mailman system itself is unchanged from what we 
shipped, they have changed the interface that is used to manage 
Mailman, but none of the people on this list know anything about it.

Hell, the guy who runs lists.apple.com doesn't know anything about 
it, and he's running Mailman on machines at Apple that are running 
MacOS X Server, for Apple users on Apple-specific products -- but 
even he's not using the Apple-provided version of Mailman.

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

Trend Micro has announced that they will cancel the stop.mail-abuse.org
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