[Mailman-Users] external progs and permissions

[Graeme Merrall]

Didn't find too much in the archives so thought I'd try a post.
We're running up mailman-1.1 to run a read-only mailing list and we're
running it to handle getting users from an Oracle DB. Now I know diddly
about Python and  people are able to sign up for various mailing lists
through a web interface. Ideally at each run, we'd like to generate the
subscription list each time a mail goes out to pick up those who have
unsubscribed from the list in the DB.
My idea was to dump a list of names from the current list, feed those
back into mailman to do a mass unsubscribe, generate a list from the DB
and then do a mass-subscribe.
Now because our producers need to be able to do this, I'm just knocking
up a quick'n'dirty interface in PHP to exec remove_members, list_members
and add_members. While listing members isn't a problem, getting
remove_members to behave is proving a little tricky.

I compile mailman with --with-cgi-gid=nobody --with-mail-gid=mail and
the web interface works fine as well as the mail actually getting sent.
The PHP script also runs with the webserver permissions but sending the
output of the userlist fails due to various permissions problems. The
first was a locking issue which I got round by changing perms on the
lock dir, but there are still problems.
Traceback (innermost last):
  File "./remove_members", line 111, in ?
    main()
  File "./remove_members", line 96, in main
    mlist = MailList.MailList(listname)
  File "/home/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 62, in __init__
    self.Load()
  File "/home/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 810, in Load
    raise Errors.MMBadListError, 'Failed to access config info'
MMBadListError: Failed to access config info


Can anyone give me pointers to how I should handle permissions to do
this or am I barking up the wrong tree?

Cheers,
 Graeme