[Mailman-Users] Help - Mailman programs all do "Memory Fault' onLinux, here's what I tried to fix it

[Mark Sapiro]

Don Steiny wrote:
>
>    I am  on Debian 2.6.8.  I used apt-get to update Python to 2-4 and
>the latest version of mailman.  I used one archive in sources.list;
>
>deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free
>
>    When I attempt to start it I get this message:
>
>#
># /etc/init.d/mailman start
>* Site list for mailman (usually named mailman) missing.
>* Please create it; until then, mailman will refuse to start.


This is a Debian package issue. Somehow your update of Mailman and
Python has lost your prior Mailman installation.


>    Searching around the web I found I needed to create a list mailman
>(though I have not figured out why it was not seeing my existing lists,
>that is for later)


Assuming your prior Mailman was 2.1.x, you already had a mailman list;
it was lost with the others:


>I got this;
># newlist mailman
>Memory fault
>
>I thought the problem might be with the debian mailmail I went to
>sourceforge and downloaded and installed 2.1.11 and nothing changed. I
>though the problem might be with Python, I downlaoded and installed
>Python 2.6 and there were changes in that when I tried to install
>mailman I got this:


Mailman 2.1.11 is not compatible with Python 2.6. Python 2.4 (if
properly installed) should be fine; also 2.5.


>Compiling /var/lib/mailman/Mailman/i18n.py ...
>Compiling /var/lib/mailman/Mailman/versions.py ...
>bin/update:37: DeprecationWarning: the md5 module is deprecated; use
>hashlib instead
>  import md5
>/var/lib/mailman/Mailman/Utils.py:32: DeprecationWarning: the sha module
>is deprecated; use the hashlib module instead
>  import sha
>Traceback (most recent call last):
>  File "bin/update", line 51, in <module>
>    from Mailman import MailList
>  File "/var/lib/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 51, in <module>
>    from Mailman.Archiver import Archiver
>  File "/var/lib/mailman/Mailman/Archiver/__init__.py", line 17, in <module>
>    from Archiver import *
>  File "/var/lib/mailman/Mailman/Archiver/Archiver.py", line 32, in <module>
>    from Mailman import Mailbox
>  File "/var/lib/mailman/Mailman/Mailbox.py", line 21, in <module>
>    import mailbox
>  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.6/mailbox.py", line 19, in <module>
>    import email.message
>ImportError: No module named message
>make: *** [update] Error 1


This is one of the Python 2.6 incompatibilities.


>I copied over the 2.4 mailbox.py file to 2.6 and then I could compile
>everything with the sha and md5 warnings, which are supposedly no big
>deal, and I got one tiny change:
>
>/usr/sbin/newlist:96: DeprecationWarning: the sha module is deprecated;
>use the hashlib module instead
>  import sha
>Memory fault
>
>What should I do next?  Help!


Make sure you have good backups of your Mailman lists/ and
archives/private/ directories at a minimum.

Make sure you have a working Python installation no older than 2.4.x
and no newer than 2.5.x.

Configure Mailman 2.1.11 with the appropriate prefix, var-prefix, etc
to match your existing installation and make install.


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