[Mailman-Users] Get newer version of Mailman for Debian 6?

[Barry S. Finkel]

On 5/14/2014 2:40 PM, Sascha Rissel wrote:
> Hello there,
>
> I am running a vServer on Debian6.
> Via "apt-get install mailman" I installed and set up Mailman 2.1.13, which
> is running fine with 5 mailing lists on my server.
>
> Motivated by all those discussions about Yahoo's DMARC on this list, I
> wondered whether I can upgrade my Mailman installation to a newer version.
>
> I tried "apt-get update" and "apt-get upgrade" but I did not receive a
> newer version of Mailman.
>
> Unfortunately I don't consider myself as good enough in Linux usage, to be
> able to build Mailman binaries from scratch on my own. Indeed I tried, but
> already upon executing "configure" (Step 3 in Mailman's installation
> guide<http://list.org/mailman-install/node7.html>)
> I got a python warning
>> Distutils is not available or is incomplete
> which seems to tell me I should install another Python environment.
>
> So I came to the point when I decided that compiling Mailman on my own is
> too complicated for me, because in the end I definitely want a bug-free
> installation of Mailman.
>
> Is there maybe an easier way to get a more recent version of Mailman for my
> server?
>
> In advance, thanks for your help!
> Sascha.

When I was running a Mailman server on an Ubuntu box, I was forced to
install via a package.  But I did some research on the Debian/Ubuntu
package to see what was in it.  There were many patches that were
undocumented, and there was one patch that deleted a library that,
in some cases, is required.  So, I decided to build my own package
from the SourceForge source.  That way, I would know EXACTLY what
the source was, and I could get support from this discussion list.

It took me a while to determine what to do,
but after I had built and tested the package, I had no problems
building packages for subsequent Mailman releases.  IIRC, the last
Mailman for which I built a package was 2.1.14.  I do not know if
any changes since then would require changes to the package-build
process.  I have details on what I did, if anyone is interested.

--Barry Finkel