[Mailman-Users] mm_cfg

[Lindsay Haisley]

On Thu, 2018-01-04 at 11:30 -0600, Dimitri Maziuk wrote:
> On 2018-01-04 11:06, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> 
> > 
> > As I understand your
> > post, RH/Centos leaves mm_cfg.py in /var/lib/mailman/Mailman and puts
> > a link in /etc.  But Debian moves the actual file to /etc/mailman, and
> > puts a link in /var/lib/mailman/Mailman.  Almost surely people are
> > going to end up with their custom configs overwritten with the default
> > when they upgrade.
> Debian's way is better for this use case because it's /etc/mailman that 
> moves between the nodes. Anyway, on 2nd thought I'll just modify it on 
> both nodes: it's not like it gets any changes after the initial hostname 
> and spamassassin additions.
> 
> > 
> > It's just not worth it for an application that's basically EOL, just
> > to make one user with an exceptional environment happier.
> No, of course not.

An historical note and a feature request here, which may be relevant.
 
The document at <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-developers/2004-October/017343.html>
is from 2004 but outlines the initial thinking by folks a Red Hat
trying to bring Mailman in line with the Linux FHS. This probably
relates to distributions such as CentOS as well, which are RHEL-
derived.

Also, since group assignments, file locations, etc. are still somewhat
distribution-specific for Mailman, it would be helpful if the standard
build would include an executable binary, e.g. "mailman-config", which
would simply spit back the compiled-in prefix, exec-prefix, bindir,
sbindir, etc., along with the full configure argument string as it
appeared at build time.

The latter wouldn't take care of per-distribution symlinking issues,
but it would be helpful to those of us who always build Mailman from
source, especially if we're trying to comply with our distribution's
FHS. Yes, I can look at config.log in the source to find out how I
successfully built MM last time but it would be great if this
information could be encapsulated into a binary which was always
somewhere such as the ~mailman/bin directory and was there even if the
build source wasn't included in the distribution package. I use the
Courier mail suite for mail handling and every build and every
distribution's package contains "courier-config" which tells precisely
how the configure-cow ate the cabbages at build-time.

-- 
Lindsay Haisley       | "The first casualty when
FMP Computer Services |         war comes is truth."
512-259-1190          |            
http://www.fmp.com    |     -- Hiram W Johnson