[Mailman-Users] Mailman Problems under OSX Lion

[Brad Knowles]

On Aug 20, 2012, at 10:56 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:

>> More importantly, it would be much less difficult for us to support
>> that part of the community, which would help reduce the support
>> burden that Apple has to maintain.
> 
> C'mon, Brad, it's *annoying* to have to support that part of the
> community, but it's never been difficult.  "Install Mailman from
> source, OK?"

That's not difficult for the likes of you or me, but I can guarantee you that doing something like installing Mailman from source is very difficult for the average OS X admin.

If Apple did their part, then we could do our part to make the upgrade process relatively simple and painless, even by OS X standards -- i.e., drag-n-drop and you're done.

> llvm is a key component of their strategy for Mac OS X developer
> support as far as I can see.  They did the same with CUPS for users.
> But I don't think Mailman is a big part of their overall strategy.
> They just considered it a cool thing to put in their distribution.

I think Mailman was a bigger part of their overall strategy prior to Mountain Lion, but if the reports are to be believed then they eliminated the install of Mailman at the same time as they eliminated the ability to easily run a web server based on the apache2 code that is still installed.

Sure, if you find the right articles on the right MacFanatic websites, you can be lead to a PrefPane that you can add to your system that will allow you to re-enable apache2, but that doesn't change the fact that apache is disabled by default and there is no standard OS-provided way to turn it back on.

Been there, already done that.


I think Apple is in the process of removing a lot of stuff from the Server component.  As to what motivation you want to ascribe those actions to, well that's your choice.

>> Yes, well -- he had the advantage that not only was he an Apple
>> employee, he was also running lists.apple.com, and used Mailman to
>> do it.
> 
> Well, the real point is that as somebody running some of the biggest
> most active lists in the world, he didn't use Apple's version -- he
> used and advocated stock Mailman.  And he didn't have a lot nice to
> say about Apple server support, either.

My point was more about the fact that he said the things he did, but specifically as the guy who was running lists.apple.com.

No other person who works (or worked) at Apple and said the same sorts of things would be likely to carry the same kind of weight.  And no one outside of Apple would be able to say the same kinds of things and have them carry the same kind of weight with people who are using OS X Server.

The key is not just what he was saying, which I was taking as granted.  The key is that he was saying those things as a person uniquely positioned to be able to say them and have them carry weight with the particular user community in question.

> *We* can.  Apple won't.

As I said, we can do better.

> Now, if somebody here can channel Steve Jobs and get direct access to
> the top execs at Apple, maybe they could force the server people to
> turn over maintenance to us.  But the server division would surely
> fight that with fire.

At their worst, they would not have fought the effort with fire.  They would have simply ignored it, and it would never have happened.


However, I am starting to wonder if this kind of stuff going away is not part of an overall effort to dumb-down OS X so that it can be unified with iOS.

I do recall some slips at the WWDC Keynote address where it was referred to as "iOS X" by a couple of people....  At least, it does make me wonder how something like Mailman could be re-written to work effectively on something like iOS.

--
Brad Knowles <brad at shub-internet.org>
LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>