[Mailman-Developers] Multiple instances of mailman : some thoughts for improving the current status.

[Clement Hermann]

Hello,

I need multiple instances of mailman for separate name space between
virtual domains, as I'm not willing to patch if I can avoid it (I'd
rather migrate to a virtual-hosting capable mailman once it goes out).

However, installing multiple mailman instances from source with a
different $PREFIX could make things difficult in a production
environment, especially regarding security updates.

In a perfect world (from the sysadmin point of vue) the prefix should be
configurable through an environment variable or a configuration file
(but the latter would be more complicated, as you would have to be able
to choose the mm_cfg.py from the command line). That way, it would be
trivial to set up several instances by copiying data files and linking
binaries / script. a simple wrapper (shell, or C, or whatever) could
then call the right binaries from the current path or an additional
parameter. A security upgrade would then be just a matter of
reinstalling the files in the master installation

I'm far from being a python coder (I know perl and shell a lot better),
but I can't see from the code where that could cause a problem. The C
CGI won't represent a problem either, just need to use the environment
with perhaps a default value for the $prefix value instead of
hard-coding it at compilation time. Is there anything preventing us to
modify the code in such a way ? Am I missing something obvious, or
underestimating the difficulties ? Please tell me what you think.

Cheers,

-- 
Clément Hermann (nodens)