[Mailman-Users] Installation on Mac OSX

[Michael Johnson]

On Wednesday, March 6, 2002, at 03:07 PM, Dan Mick wrote:

> 1) all the symptoms of any problem are important, in computers, 
> medicine,
> automobile repair, or psychology.  There are three problems above:

Correct...


> 1) the configure program can't open conftest.py
> 2) the cat program can't open conftest.out
> 3) the configure program can't find the mailman user.
>
> Since conftest.out strongly hints that it comes from conftest.py,
> and since the errors appear in that order, it would be eminently
> reasonable to assume that 1) causes 2) causes 3).
>
I noted this earlier this morning (EST).

> So let's stop talking about 2) and 3) and focus on 1).
>
Finally...

> *Why* can't ./configure open conftest.py?
>
This is the question I posted this morning.  I assumed it was a 
permissions problem and possibly assumed incorrectly causing me to ask 
the wrong question.

> To answer that question, obtain the following:
>
> 1) ls -ld of the containing directory ('.' in ./configure)
>
This bring up the following:

[smudette:~/mailman-2.0.8] mailman% ls -ld
drwxrwsr-x  33 4101  4101  1078 Nov 27 17:54 .

> 2) output of id *from the same state you're running ./configure*
> (i.e. run ./configure and see the failure, and then immediately
> run id at the next shell prompt)

[smudette:~/mailman-2.0.8] mailman% id
uid=5990(mailman) gid=0(wheel) groups=0(wheel), 5990(mailman)

To my non-mailman-expert eyes, it appears as though the user mailman 
with the UID of 5990 is in the groups wheel and mailman.  It also 
appears the directory containing the distro is owned by a phantom user 
(4101).

Now, to ask the same question again...

Is there a permissions problem based on the owner:group of 4101 on the 
distro and the owner:group I wish to run/install mailman as?  Is there a 
problem with the user 4101 (which doesn't exist on my system) trying to 
run configure or Python?  Where do I need to make the changes to get 
this going?

Hopefully, this time, the question is clearer and I can get mailman up 
and running some time very soon.

-Michael