[Mailman-Users] Ubuntu release of Mailman

[Lindsay Haisley]

I just installed, and just as promptly un-installed mailman on Ubuntu
server 10.04.4 LTS.  The offered pacakge version of mailman for this
release, which I used, is 2.1.13-1.

I have a few questions which perhaps someone could answer, if anyone
knows the thinking behind Canonical's (and the package maintainer's)
motives/reasons for what was done.

The most awkward change, for me, is the elimination altogether of the
mailman user.  Mailman native scripts and utilities apparently get run
as root, which as always brings up a whole kettle of security questions.
On top of that, I've written a script package to parse and automatically
unsubscribe list subscribers based on AOL's "Email feedback reports" for
all the lists I host, using, among other things, mailman's python
library and the withlist utility.  These scripts depend on the existence
of a non-privileged Mailman user account with a home dir
of /usr/lib/mailman.  Yes, I could hack the scripts to make things work,
but I'm in the process of a major server move between Linux platforms
from different distributions and my time is budgeted.

Why was this done?

It looks as if I'm going to have to install mailman from source on
Ubuntu.  I believe the Gentoo download, installed on my older servers,
hewed much more closely to the methods and design of the Mailman devs,
but I'm wondering what I'm missing here, or if the change was just due
to lazy package design on Canonical's part.

-- 
Lindsay Haisley       | "Real programmers use butterflies"
FMP Computer Services |
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