[Mailman-Users] Questions About 2.1.9 to 2.1.11 Upgrade

[Mark Sapiro]

Barry Finkel wrote:

>When I upgraded my test Ubuntu system from Mailman 2.1.9 to 2.1.11
>I saw messages for each list:
>
>     Updating mailing list: mailman 
>     Updating the held requests database.
>     - updating old private mbox file
>	 looks like you have a really recent CVS installation...
>	 you're either one brave soul, or you already ran me
>     - updating old public mbox file
>	 looks like you have a really recent CVS installation...
>	 you're either one brave soul, or you already ran me
>     Fixing language templates: mailman 
>
>What is updated in the "private mbox file" and the "public mbox file"?
>I need to know if I need to backup the
>
>     /var/lib/mailman/archives
>
>directory before I convert.  I would prefer not to, as the archives
>are VERY large.


Over the years (pre Mailman 2.1) the mbox file has been located in
different places in the hiereachy and had different names. bin/update
(run as the final step of 'make install') is figuring out whether the
mbox is in the place where the current release expects it to be, and
if it isn't, will move it there. The 'private'

   looks like you have a really recent CVS installation...
   you're either one brave soul, or you already ran me

message (admitedly not a very good message at this point) says that it
found archives/private/LISTNAME.mbox/LISTNAME.mbox and didn't find any
of the prior (pre 2.1) files so it didn't need to do anything. The
'public' message says it didn't find an actual file (as opposed to a
symlink to a directory) at archives/public/LISTNAME and didn't need to
do anything there either.

In any case, it doesn't touch the contents of these files at all. It
just renames them.


>I assume that if something drastic goes wrong with the update, then
>the only recourse is to restore all of the Mailman directories from
>a tar backup taken just before the conversion.  I assume that just
>re-installing the Mailman 2.1.9 package (that I am currently running)
>over the 2.1.11 package will not work.  Note that these packages are
>ones I built from the SourceForge source, not the Ubuntu/Debian
>packages.  Thanks.


That's more or less correct. You can 'force' a downgrade, but it won't
undo various config.pck, etc. changes. In many cases including
downgrading from 2.1.11 to 2.1.9, the only changes would have been the
addition of a couple of list attributes that wouldn't be referenced in
2.1.9 anyway, so a downgrade would be safe, BUT "if something drastic
goes wrong with the update", there's no telling what might have been
corrupted. It's always a good idea to have a backup.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan