[Mailman-Developers] Welcome To "Mailman-Developers"!

[John Viega]

On Wed, Jun 03, 1998 at 04:08:03AM -0400, Michael McLay wrote:

> Is the install script for the next release going to include automatic
> creation of directories using autoconfig.

Yes... thank Barry for that!

> I'm having some trouble do to the odd setup of our servers.  The
> sendmail program is running on a system that is separate from the www
> server.  
> 
> When the command "/home/mailman/mailman/mail/wrapper post gencam" is
> run by sendmail it tries to archive the files on a disk that is on a
> different system and, if I understand correctly, this can't be done
> because setuid won't work across NFS mounts.  

Hmm...  So web based files and mail based (data) files need to have
seperate configurable directories.

BTW, I was thinking about how to do SMTP and httpd on 2 seperate
machines w/o NFS, and the easiest way is to run Mailman on the machine
w/ the web server, and have sendmail aliases use rsh to run programs
:) We should consider more efficient strategies, though, because I'm
sure that people will want to do this sort of thing often.

> 
> I really like the look of mailman and I've read through many of the
> scripts.  It is much easier on the eyes than Majordomo.  The one
> conceptual problem I'm having with understanding the product is the
> interactions between the mailman user and the deamons.  The
> permissions setting for mailman files are not obvious.  Which files
> must be writable by "nobody" and which must be writeable by "mailman".
> Mailman seems to be in the middle between two deamons and a little
> more help in understanding the interactions would be appreciated.
> For instance, MAILMAN_DIR/lists/LISTNAME/config.db seems to require
> both mailman and nobody to have write permission.

Hmm, all of these files should be owned by Mailman.  However, both
sendmail and cgi processes may need to modify these data files.  So
when a mail or web request comes in, we set the SUID bit.  Hmm, if
SUID doesn't work across file systems, you may have to decide that
mail commands don't work, unless you mirror the list data file across
systems, because both mail commands and list commands can be used to
subscribe, change options, etc.

> Has bundling mailman as a package been considered? some of the mm_X.py
> files look like good candidates to be hidden inside a package.

It's slowly happening, yes.  Barry's done a lot of work towards that end.