[Mailman-Users] Looking for professional help

[Brad Knowles]

On 5/17/07, Ivan Van Laningham wrote:

>  That's interesting.  I use Plesk, and have not found anything different
>  in my Mailman installation in the Python/HTML and config files other
>  than a different base location than an installed-from-source Mailman
>  would have.  Everything behaves the way I expect, except for the fact
>  that I have to create lists using Plesk, which is not a hardship (and in
>  fact it's easier than my much older previous installation from source).
>
>  Does anyone know whether or not Plesk has made any changes?

I can't say for sure, but I'm not aware of the Plesk folks making any 
material changes to the Mailman code.  However. like most binary 
packagers I would assume that they store things according to the way 
that makes sense to them and not necessarily in the way that you 
would get if you were to install our code directly.


So far as I know, the biggest issue with most Plesk/Mailman 
installations is the *ancient* versions of Python, Mailman, and other 
packages that they install.  I mean, like Mailman 2.0.x.

So, if you want to run a more recent version of Mailman, you'll have 
a rough time installing a more recent version of Python that does not 
interfere with the existing installation (the older version is also 
required for some other things inside of Plesk), plus the newer 
version of Mailman with specific references to the newer & 
non-standard installation of Python, etc....

You can do it if you know what you're doing, and you're able to 
follow all the compatibility dependencies manually, but that's going 
to take a lot of work and jury-rigging.  Of course, all of that will 
mean that you now have a non-standard installation of Plesk, and you 
probably won't be able to get any support from them, or your ISP, and 
so on.  Moreover, upgrading to a newer version of Plesk would un-do 
all that hard work which you would then have to re-do again manually, 
assuming it were actually possible to upgrade Plesk in that kind of 
environment.

It's more of a major operational hassle/support nightmare than anything else.

-- 
Brad Knowles <brad at shub-internet.org>, Consultant & Author
LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>
Slides from Invited Talks: <http://tinyurl.com/tj6q4>

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