[Mailman-Users] Newbie Questions

[John Viega]

On Thu, May 28, 1998 at 05:13:06PM -0400, Corbett J. Klempay wrote:
> The thing is, I'm
> wondering...documentation seems sparse.  Not having much experience with
> even Majordomo, I'm wondering if you could maybe give me the Reader's
> Digest version of how I'd move our Majordomo lists to a Mailman
> installation (and how I'd install Mailman) on this new machine (the new
> machine is a Red Hat 5.0, soon to be 5.1 installation; detailed info about
> all aspects of the machine are available through our website).  

Well, the documentation is indeed somewhat lacking.  It's fairly high
on my personal wishlist.  Thankfully, what you want to do is pretty
easy.  First, you create new lists with the same name as the old list.
Then you run bin/convert_list.  The documentation for that is
currently in the comments at the top of the file.  It's all pretty
straightforward.

> Are there
> any disadvantages to using Mailman vs. Majordomo?  

Nothing comes to mind...

> If I get too much
> resistence to using Mailman from the other machine admins, I think I'll
> have to try something like MajorCool with Majordomo...but Mailman seems to
> be a much cleaner solution.  

Well, if it helps sell Mailman, you can tell them that Mailman is now
the GNU mailing list manager.  

> Also, how easy is it to install and get
> Pipermail running?  It seems way cool :)  

As of the next release, (which should be in about 2 weeks, I'd say),
pipermail will come bundled with Mailman, and will work out of the
box.

> Sorry if I'm taking up a little
> chunk of your time; I just want to get this installed on the new machine
> (or at least know how) so that they don't beat me to the punch with a
> Majordomo install (after which they'd be more reluctant to pull it out and
> let me toy with Mailman :)

No need to apologize, that's what this list is here for :)

You could run both Mailman and Majorodmo at the same time w/o
difficulty, if you are so inclined.

John