[Mailman-Users] Ubuntu release of Mailman

[Adam McGreggor]

On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 04:31:41PM -0700, Mark Sapiro wrote:
> That sounds good, but evidently, judging from the number of
> Debian/Ubuntu packge users who come to this list with mail delivery
> issues because they have ended up with some Postfix configuration that
> combines Mailman aliases and postfix_to_mailman.py in incompatible
> ways

They should be using Exim, and not the monstrosity that is
pkg-exim4...

( http://wiki.debian.org/DefaultMTA#Popcon_report_and_install_size )

(I have a deep dislike of Postfix, my solution to dealing with postfix
is `postconf -n > /root/postfix-perversions` and then `aptitude install
exim4-daemon-heavy`)

There does seem to be a disproportionate amount of postfix queries on
this list, yes.

> people don't look at the Debian documentation. 

But they don't. Part of this I think falls in to how apt handles
STDOUT during an installation. Imagine, if you will, installing thirty
or so packages, and each one, as it crops up, drops out a line or two;
they're not going to be seen, necessarily. Rather than "ah, you should
read your apt.log", my approach would be to amalgamate all of those to
the end -- something I think Homebrew (and most Ruby Gems I've seen)
does fantastically well.

> They look at our
> installation manual or some incompatible web HowTo and wind up with a
> mess.
> 
> I wish they all would read and comprehend the FAQ at
> <http://wiki.list.org/x/OIDD>.

I thought it was exim-users, or similar that would have in the
/listinfo/ page something to the effect of, "use pkg-exim4-users if
you're a Debianista" -- that seems to have gone now. I think Nigel's
on this list; am I mis-remembering?

> >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.

FWIW, I tend to use the Debian maintainers' versions of Exim, but have
a couple of patches that are manually applied (well, the deployment
system does them for me).

Packaged versions of software may not always be the most up-to date
version, but, for instance, IIRC, the XSS exploit was fixed-up fairly
quickly after announcement (the heads-up probably helped) -- certainly
more quickly than the time it would have taken for me to manually
apply the patch, 'properly' (rather than doing it from mutt...).

(If I wanted cutting edge, I'd use nightly/trunk from VCS... if it
wasn't bzr (never been able to get my head around it).)


-- 
"It is lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a
 civilisation. We can destroy ourselves by cynicism  and disillusion,
 just as effectively as by bombs."
    -- Kenneth Clark