[Mailman-Developers] 2.1a2 and 2.0.6 on same box

[Barry A. Warsaw]

>>>>> "AH" == Andy Heath <a.k.heath@shu.ac.uk> writes:

    AH> No responses so try again with better subject categorisation -
    AH> must ask here because its about 2.1a2.  Someone else *must* be
    AH> doing this already, surely -

I do it, 'natch.

    AH> I'm wanting to get seriously into 2.1a2 and do some hacking
    AH> (small quantity of free labour here) - have only one box and
    AH> need to continue running existing lists on 2.0.6 - what are
    AH> the constraints on running multiple mailmans (mailmen ?
    AH> mailwomen?)  concurrently on the same system ?

Plural: "Maildudes" :)

    AH> 1. Can I use same UID and GID , use $prefix to another
    AH> directory, merge the crontabs and tailor some URL path info
    AH> for apache so the right URL's invoke different mailman
    AH> instances ?  I'm currently using my own hacked version of
    AH> Archiver.py with hypermail for archiving some lists and
    AH> pipermail with others on a per-list basis.

You can use the same uid/gid, but you definitely want to install them
in separate trees.  E.g. My MM2.0.6 installation is still in
/home/mailman but MM2.1 is in /usr/local/mailman.

The points of contention will be where the system interacts with the
list software, e.g. cron, MTA, and web server.

Web server is easy if you accept that you'll need different urls to
the two systems.  I usually create Alias/ScriptAlias entries that map
something like http://mail.python.org/mailman2.1/ to my Mailman 2.1
tree.

The MTA is a little trickier because you need to watch out for
overlapping aliases.  With my installation, I've taught Postfix to use
the old `auto' script for MM2.0.6 lists, but to consult
/usr/local/mailman/data/aliases.db for the MM2.1 lists.  I just can't
have a list with the same name in both systems (but you probably could
weasel around with virtual domains to achieve this).

With cron, you'll need to merge the entries, which I think should be
fairly straight forward.  I actually don't do this because my MM2.1
lists aren't live yet, and with mailmanctl, you don't need to use cron
to get your messages delivered.  I just manually invoke senddigests or
mailpasswds when I want to test that out.

-Barry