[Mailman-Users] Linux Preferred?

[Barry Finkel]

The esteemed Brad Knowles has said:
>> 
>> on 1/27/09 9:07 AM, Tim Ferguson said:
>> 
>> > Is there a preferred flavor of Linux that Mailman seems to work and
>> > install the best with?  I'm trying Ubuntu, but the apt-get feature is
>> > getting hung up on trying to find the repositories and can't, so,
>> > until I get that fixed I just thought I'd ask.
>> 
>> If you're installing from our source, then most any recent version of 
>> Linux should work fine.  If you're installing from someone else's binary 
>> packages, then you are dependent on the person doing the packaging -- 
>> they have to keep up with our releases, back-port patches, etc....
>> 
>> 
>> On python.org, where we host all the official mailman-* mailing lists, 
>> Debian works just fine.  But we run the version from our own source, and 
>> not the binary packaged version.
 

and Hank van Cleef <vancleef at lostwells.net> replied:
>I have to put in another "plug" for building Mailman from sources vs.
>doing a prepackaged install built by somebody else.   I have just
>built and installed Mailman 2.1.11 and 2.1.12rc1 on Solaris 10
>following the installation guide at
>
>http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman-install/index.html
>
>If you've got an appropriate Python installed and have a compiler on
>the build machine, actually configuring, building, and installing the
>Mailman application is the easiest part of the job.  The remainder are
>very straightforward systems administration tasks to get the mailman
>account set up properly and get correct permissions on everything.  
>
>We also built Mailman 2.1.9 on a Debian machine a couple of years ago.
>Another guy did the work and had problems because he did not follow
>the Installation Guide completely.  I was asked to audit and correct
>things, which involved no more than correcting group name and
>permissions as outlined in the Installation Guide.  
>
>I have always been an advocate for building from source rather than
>using prepackaged as the default choice for add-on programs.  Only
>when I trust a pre-built package (as with the sendmail and bind in the
>Solaris distribution) do I use a prepackaged version.

One of the requirements from my management when I installed Mailman
on Ubuntu was that all installs had to be done via packages.  That is
why I built the Mailman 2.1.9 and 2.1.11 packages.  For other software -
for example, Postfix, Apache2, Python - I could live with the
Ubuntu-supplied packages.  Until there is a major problem with
something in the package that it takes the Ubuntu support staff too
long to fix (which may never happen).
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Barry S. Finkel
Computing and Information Systems Division
Argonne National Laboratory          Phone:    +1 (630) 252-7277
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Building 222, Room D209              Internet: BSFinkel at anl.gov
Argonne, IL   60439-4828             IBMMAIL:  I1004994