[Mailman-Users] How to debug mailman problems?

[Tom Limoncelli]

Luckily I happen to be at SAGE-AU right now, and someone here was able
to help with some real-time debugging.  (It's good to be a speaker...
everyone wants to help out)

The problem turned out to be quite odd and something unique to this
site, which makes it nearly a waste to describe here.  There was a file
that was a symbolic link to a place that didn't exit and mailman wasn't
handling the error properly.

The files in the "public" directory are symbolic links to the actual
files in "private".  The links are not relative links.  Previously
mailman was installed at /opt/mailman-$VERSION but since the upgrade
process doesn't work that way, my newer installation had been
/opt/mailman instead (and I moved things around to maintain the old
archives).  However, ~mailman/public still included symbolic links
pointing to /opt/mailman-$VERSION.  When I deleted
/opt/mailman-$VERSION (that release wasn't used anymore) the system
stopped working.

I don't know what to suggest to improve things.  The links could be
relative, instead of absolute.  That, of course, has other trade-offs.
check_perms should at least check to make sure that symbolic links
point to someplace that exists and complain otherwise.

Either way... thanks to everyone that emailed me (privately
and publicly) with suggestions.  I know understand the internals
of mailman a bit more, and will have less difficulties debugging
problems in the future.

--tal

-- 
Tom Limoncelli -- tal at whatexit.org       BiZone's regional conference:
http://whatexit.org/tal                     "ENDLESS POSSIBILITIES"
http://www.EverythingSysadmin.com           November 15-17, 2002, Princeton, NJ
	                                    http://www.BiZone.org/con2002