[Mailman-Users] Migration from Majordomo

[Hrvoje Niksic]

Rick Niess <rniess at netserver3.otr.usm.edu> writes:
[...]

Thanks for your thoughtful response (and my gratitude extends to Paul
Tomblin).

>From what I hear, Mailman doesn't really appear completely mature at
this point.  It appears as if I should wait for a few months before
installing it to a production machine.  (But please Barry correct me
if you think I'm wrong).  Particularly, my setup would depend on
stable config and list files, and smooth upgrades.

Config files not being plain text could be a problem.  Pickles and
marshals are nice, but you can't manipulate them with `sed'.  If there
were at least a published Python interface to accessing, creating and
changing all these things, I could whip up a Python script that went
over lists and imported them to Mailman.

Speed also sounds like a potential problem.  Python is a great
language, but the current implementation is horribly slow, even
compared to other interpreters.  I have fears that other solutions,
like Listar, will prove more feasible as the number of lists increases
to 50 or 100+.

I'd love to see documents comparing e.g. Mailman and Listar.

> - If you plan on letting Majordomo and Mailman coexist for a while
> so you can make the transition one list at a time with little or no
> downtime (like I did), you'll need to rename Mailman's wrapper and
> its alias in /etc/smrsh (assuming you're using Sendmail) to
> something like mailman-wrapper to avoid stomping on Majordomo's
> wrapper.

Okay, I don't understand this one.  My /etc/aliases looks like this
(mylist is a test list):

## mylist mailing list
## created: 24-Nov-1999 mailman
mylist:                  "|/home/mailman/mail/wrapper post mylist"
mylist-admin:            "|/home/mailman/mail/wrapper mailowner mylist"
mylist-request:          "|/home/mailman/mail/wrapper mailcmd mylist"
owner-mylist:            mylist-admin
mylist-owner:            mylist-admin

OTOH, the majordomo stuff typically looks like this:

#embryo lista

embryo:                 "|/usr/local/lib/majordomo/wrapper resend -l embryo embryo-list"
embryo-list:            :include:/home/majordom/lists/embryo,"|/usr/local/lib/majordomo/wrapper archive2.pl -a  -m -f /home/majordom/archive/embryo/embryo.archive"
owner-embryo:           puma at iskon.hr
embryo-owner:           puma at iskon.hr
embryo-request:         "|/usr/local/lib/majordomo/wrapper majordomo -l embryo"
embryo-approval:        puma at iskon.hr

So all wrappers are referenced with an absolute path, and I don't see
a problem.

> Also, has anyone gotten in touch with the owners of Integral.org to
> see what difficulties they've had?

Um, do they have a home page?  www.integral.org does not appear
useful.