[Mailman-Developers] OSX installation problem - no "mailman" user

[John W Baxter]

At 12:37 +0100 7/12/2002, Robert Crosbie wrote:
>John W Baxter hath declared on Thursday the 11 day of July 2002  :-:
>> Greg Westin <westin@fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
>>
>> >I sent this question to the mailman-users list and got no response, so I
>> >thought maybe I should try here.  I don't know if this is a problem
>> >because I'm a novice at these UNIX installations, or if there's
>> >something wrong with the Darwin installer:
>>
>> I haven't looked at the configure script (at all...I don't know what
>> language it's in),
>
>Basically a shell script...
>
>> but the symptoms sound as if the script is not using
>> normal system calls to retrieve the mailman user information... the
>> Pythonic pwd.getpwnam() for example would get it just fine.  Is it doing
>
>Perhaps you should have checked the script, it does in fact use
>pwd.getpwuid() and/or pwd.getpwnam().
>I assume these work properly on OSX.

Well, pwd.getpwnam() doesn't work "properly" but the failure is not
involved here.

(The encrypted password is returned by getpwnam regardless of whether root
or someone else runs it.  Coupled with the traditional 8-character crypt()
used for the passwords, this is a major flaw in Apple's security.  This
isn't a Python thing...the Perl equivalent also gets the password field.)

I haven't put Mailman on my Mac OS X machine.

[I haven't bothered to replace sendmail, either, but before actually
allowing port 25 connections I need a mail program I can
configure...fortunately while I've been driving Unix since 1995 "at" work
(same chair), we ditched sendmail when Exim became viable.  So I know
almost as little about sendmail as Aunt Sally does.]

  --john

-- 
John Baxter   jwblist@olympus.net      Port Ludlow, WA, USA