[Mailman-Users] Ubuntu release of Mailman

[Geoff Shang]

Hi,

I'd like to make the case for considering the Debian etc Mailman instead 
of rolling your own.

I've done several Mailman installs under Debian and Ubuntu and have had 
minimal problems.  The key in my opinion is to look at the installation 
guide and make sure you actually do everything that's listed there that's 
appropriate.  It's easy enough to assume that a lot of what you need to do 
regarding setup will be done for you when you install a package, but this 
isn't really the case with Mailman (by necessity).

ONe of the reasons why installing from source is not exactly 
straight-forward is that Debian has conventions for things like the user 
accounts used for specific things.  If you're going to compile Mailman 
from source on a Debian-based system, you'll need to either undermine a 
lot of other things, or supply the appropriate configure flags so that 
Mailman uses the accounts that Debian uses.

I had to do a number of Mailman instals on a Ubuntu box in 2009.  This is 
the command line I came up with:

./configure --with-username=list --with-groupname=list \
--with-mail-gid=list --with-cgi-gid=www-data

These flags were a product of looking at the Debian package sources and 
several rounds with the various bits of the system where it complained 
about user mismatches.

Since I was doing multiple installs for multiple virtual hosts (see other 
thread on this), I also added:

--prefix=/usr/local/mailman/example.com/ --with-mailhost=example.com
--with-urlhost=www.example.com

I also wrote the following in my file of notes at the time (since I was 
going to have to do this multiple times):

You might want to umask 002 before running make.

after make install:

cd $prefix
bin/check_perms

then
chown www-data archives/private
chmod o-x archives/private

(Do stuff specific to your webserver and MTA setup)

Run bin/genailiases from $prefix

Try check-perms again after genaliases

-------CUT here -------

There were some other bits and pieces specific to the multiple hosts 
aspect of it.  IN particular, there was a patch I was applying to add the 
domain as a suffix so that the same list name could be used across 
domains.  I'm not sure if that patch is now the virtual hosts branch or if 
it's something else.

All this was a product of many days of slavery and lots of helpful advice 
from this list, which you can read at the following threads (don't know 
why they split):

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2009-October/067354.html
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2009-October/067363.html
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2009-October/067364.html

Hope all of this is of some use to someone.

Geoff.